The Shadow (3 page)

You never sat on an old rock in a hill burn and let sun and wind dry you?

There was a time, I think, when I lost consciousness, when either I fell asleep or thinned away on sun and wind. Perhaps it was only a second or two, but I have the feeling it was longer, perhaps five minutes.

I came home hardly walking on my own feet. I must have been terribly tired and weak. But I did not feel it that way. And a glory came with me. It was in my skin. I smiled, it was so friendly. My skin and the glory and all my eyes could see and the eyes themselves and you. And something I learned will be for ever with me. Come weal or woe, it will be there, heightening or deepening, sunlight or shadow. Oh, Ran! I am shy suddenly of saying outright what I want to say to you. I seem only to have been saying it through everything in the world.

A terrible thing has happened. The old man who lived in the cottage away round the shoulder of the hill has been murdered. He lived all alone and some say he couldn't have had much money because he was getting the Old Age Pension, but Will here—the first horseman—who knew him said he wouldn't be surprised if he had a good thing in his kist. His kist—a brown-painted wooden chest—was smashed open with the axe which still had the blood on it. I stood behind listening to Aunt Phemie and Will going over all the details. I couldn't move. I saw the kist and the white splinters. I tried not to see much else but it was no use, because Will knew where the hacks and gashes were. He put his hand up to his neck and then to his temples and drew the gashes with a thick red-blue finger. He said it was clear that old Farquhar had put up a bit of a fight. There was a notion, he said, that the fellow (the murderer) must first of all have gone in and asked Farquhar for money. Something like a smile came to Will's face. I cannot describe it to you. He is well over sixty and looks older and has been a farm worker all his life. The smile that whin-roots make under the ground. In an instant I saw that Farquhar was like that too, only older still, and for anyone to demand money—money!—it was a joke so profound that the smile could no more come up than the roots—or the money. Farquhar would fairly have shown him the door then! said Will. But I can't remember Will's words any more for they made me see the fellow going out, the woodblock and the axe by the barn door, the loneliness of the cottage, the quietness, the hand lifting the axe, then back to the door. Farquhar barred the door inside. The door is driven in by the axe. I began to see the theory, for Will was very explicit at this point; he plays draughts with a lad in the bothy; he was in no hurry, enjoying his moves. For why would Farquhar have barred the door? Even if he had been in bed he would have got up and opened it to anyone. He would have opened to anyone at any hour, he always did, said Will. And Farquhar must now have been expecting him, for the long iron tongs … Suddenly, before I could properly turn round, I was sick. They had forgotten I was there. Aunt Phemie helped me into the house for my legs gave under me. I got terribly cold. When was in bed and she was leaving the room, I wanted to call her back. I had to shut my teeth with all my strength. I longed for everything to be blotted out. My wish grew so strong, my teeth bit so strongly on Aunt Phemie's pillowcase, that my wish was granted.

I am writing this to you, Ranald, quite calmly. That part of it is past. And the horrible night I had. It was really very horrible. There was a time when I thought I was going off my head for good. I think I must have gone off it for a bit because Aunt Phemie came in in her nightdress. I clung to her. But I was quite cunning. Isn't it extraordinary how deep the cunning root goes in us? I know I had been calling out but when I got a hold on myself as well as on Aunt Phemie I said it was a nightmare. She accepted that. Though as I write this I am not now quite so sure. For she was—well, at first she was kind but firm. Then she was firm and tender. Then somehow she was tenderness itself and I entered in there. But that is too feminine altogether to mention to you. Yet I wish I could, too, because, Ranald—oh, I haven't words for it. I entered a region. I was in that place where tenderness is. It is a country. Actually I was in Aunt Phemie's bed, and you will think that she was petting me, and for a grown woman of twenty-five solid years to be made a mother's darling again in that way is a bit too terrible if not positively indecent. I know, Ranald. Believe me, I am learning a lot—and particularly this: how awful a thing is man created in the image of the psychoanalyst. That's not said lightly. I didn't toy with Freud's great tome on
The Interpretation of Dreams
for nothing. And I am not saying anything against that or any other work of the kind, for I know how instinctively we react, try to get our own back, against what we feel is a degradation of the spirit, a defilement of the springing source or fountain of life. You see, I cannot use even these words without now being aware of their sexual symbolism. And I don't mind. I don't really, Ranald. Not any more. For there is a region in which they matter no more than (or as much as, if you like) any other old myth or legend. It's in that region I was with Aunt Phemie. I wandered there, and as she talked, telling me things out of her life, the tenderness was given form and shape as by a kind of irony which was beyond us but which we understood. I wish I could tell you how clear all this was, like an understanding of fate or destiny that was not hopeless though it was without hope—in the sense that we could never understand the meaning, the purpose, or the end. But it was there, as children are there, looked at by a woman's eyes.

But I mustn't go on like this or you'll be thinking I have gone potty again, finally neurotic. Yet, seeing I am on the topic, I would like to mention two thoughts I had (next day, probably, when I was thinking about this, in order to keep myself from thinking about the murder). The first was that it is a pity all the psychoanalysts are men, all the famous ones. There should have been at least one famous woman pioneer. The second thought was that there shouldn't. Biologically speaking, woman is the creative partner. (“She bears the burden,” said Aunt Phemie.) It is not her particular business to analyse, to tear the strands and bits apart. Once she started that, the very unnaturalness (biologically, again) of her attitude would make her a perfect demon at it. You know how Julie went with drugs.

My thought slipped there, Ranald. For I got very tired. I had a sudden awful longing to hand you the burden of myself. I am trying to be honest. I resent all this. I want the sun, the light, the light glistening on grass, on leaves; the wind that snares you with an eddy that you break out of with a laugh on your own dancing feet.

My head drooped there. I squirmed a bit. For I know how the girls of our set—the quite serious ones, too, like Winifred—would feel uncomfortable before such appalling naïvety. They would see me throwing an act. Nan's new act. Oh God, Ran, Ran, it's terrible! With the world as it is, it's terrifying.

I am writing all this in snatches, in little spurts. I may not send it to you, or not all of it. I'll see. I feel awfully lonely sometimes. Like a child. Like one that's never grown up. (And that immediately brought in Barrie. Just as a moment ago when I wrote about wanting the sun I thought of the young artist, going blind from his father's disease, crying to his mother for the sun in that play of Ibsen's. The free literary associations from our moderns! How ghastly! Will there be no end to it—until the ends of the world come upon us, soon?)

The hypersensitive condition of the convalescent! Of course. I know quite well. And if I'm going to get physically fit for London again it's high time I was sensibly busy about it. This time there wouldn't be a blitz, no excuse for breaking in bits in your hands on the spot. So as Aunt Phemie was going to the market town, five miles away, I set out for the wood and the moor and the hill burn.

I suddenly hate to worry you further with doleful thoughts (how moods change in the course of a letter!) so I shan't tell you how the wonder was gone from the grass and the leaves and even from the wild flowers. I plodded on. That murder of the old man hadn't done me any good. You know what I mean, Ranald, quite simply. I had seen dead bodies and bits of bodies in London town and helped where I could. I was sick often, but never mind. I was tough as most and it took what followed to get me down. I can only ask you to believe me when I say that this murder was for me more horrible in my imagination than what happened in London from bombs. For this was the living figure of destruction, this was the murderer, come away from the city where he had been impersonal and many-shaped, shapes flying across the sky, come at last to the country, to the quiet countryside, to prowl around on two feet and smell out a poor old man and murder him for his money.

But, Ranald, I mustn't tell you about the awful images I had of him. He was at once a real human being and, as my thought and sight whirled away like wild birds from the lines on his face, a mythical one, with stooped shoulders, moving darkly through the pattern that Farquhar's cottage made with the high land. But I mustn't tell you. I mustn't give you the detail. Be patient with me, please, Ran. I cannot tell Aunt Phemie of that inward place. I couldn't tell you face to face. Perhaps I am only telling myself out loud by writing. My brain at times works like lightning. Aunt Phemie took the pendulum off the old clock this morning. You should have heard time galloping! After that word writing—before I had got it down—I went through a sort of lifetime of experience beginning with an understanding of why a child speaks out loud to itself. And I don't mind saying that, whatever you think, because, Ranald, I also had an awful intuition of how human beings suffer
in secret.
It came upon me. I joined millions of them in all their prison camps, their inward places …

If you're alone on a moor by a burn you can shout out quite loud to yourself: Oh, stop it! And the very sound of your voice stops it! Good, isn't it?

It's quite a bare moor. It slowly dips down to the burn and then up to the mountains. As it goes on its way, however, it enters a gorge, wooded with birches, not very big ones. The ground on the right bank rolls slowly upward from the top of the gorge to a crest just over which stands Farquhar's cottage. It must be nearly two miles from where I stand. I have never been there, though of course now I know all about it. I wonder for a moment if the cottage is like what I imagine it to be.

It is the last place on earth I want to visit. So much so that I feel I have overcome something even in coming so far. It makes me feel stronger. I look all around and up to the mountain ridges in front. They are high but flat mountains and their lines flow along the sky. Over all the square miles there is no-one in sight. Some sheep dotted here and there like white stones, and a solitary old horse on a green patch up the burn on my left. That's all. Otherwise just space and the earth. I have the feeling I can listen a long way. I do. I look at the pool where I bathed. And the burn is still talking away; and the bubbles make themselves and float off.

I stand some time in order to get used to my conquest. It's nice to feel at home again, knowing nothing can come at you. I look with more confidence towards Farquhar's crest. It's very bare and the heather dark. My eyes fall to the birches in the gorge. I love birches. I begin to walk down the bank of the stream.

I am a little nervous so that I am not in the least tired, indeed exhilarated if anything. If I stumble sometimes it's because I keep my head too high. Everything
is
high and distant. The sun is shining and quiet. Then all at once it's in me—the secret delight. It has come, like a whiff of honeysuckle or wild roses.

Ran, Ran, don't misunderstand me or you'll break my heart. It's
not
mystical. I could shake you because of that doubt in your eyes. You're horrid. As if I could pretend at such a moment! Please do understand that I am trying to tell you of life, of something brighter than any eyes and lighter than laughter on its toes. The delicious bubbling fun of it. Why do young children race around; why do young women—I don't know about young men—want to race with them? Don't you see the awful thing that has happened to us, the awful curse on us? Don't you see that I can hardly write two sentences without going all selfconscious and wanting to explain? It brings the tears to my eyes. It does. I am weeping like a fool. We have murdered spontaneity. That's what we have done. The faces of analysts, everywhere, with bits of matter on slides, and bits of mind on slides, saying: That's all it is. And we wonder about war and horror! About murderers … !

That was a bad break! Even if you have been saved what I thought (where the dots are) but did not write. Right to the end of this letter—and I warn you it's a dreadful end—I am now simply going to tell you what happened on this day's outing.

I came near the first of the birches. Some warblers were singing. I like trees, particularly small birches, because they bring back my childhood, and I was happy as a child. The path was narrow and soft to the feet and went winding on, some little way above the burn, which was now in a hurry. The trees rose above me and every now and then a small bird flashed and was gone. I was fascinated and quite forgot about the murder. I came to a point where I could see the falls, the solid pour-over of the water that goes white and then black in the swirls of the rock pool below. I must have been staring some time for when the man spoke to me I got a dreadful start.

He was wearing a dark blue shirt and a light green tie. His clothes were a peppery brown. He had no hat. His hair, straight and dark brown, was smoothed back from a wide forehead. His eyes were a deep brown and looked at me with that extra attention which certain men have. It's the kind of look that many women—perhaps all women—are immediately aware of. I refuse to comment. There was also a moustache. He was not noticeably tall. His bones were fine but I knew he could move instantly and was strong.