Second Sight (11 page)
Authors: Neil M. Gunn
There was nothing for Helen to do, and she suddenly realised it.
“You needn't bother waiting,” Harry said to her. “I'll take out the tea.”
“Oh,” said Helen and paused; “all right,” and she walked out.
Dismissed! thought Harry, and felt the swift hurt in Helen's mind. He had never scored so directly over her, so cruelly. He heard her footsteps pause and go on. Pulling herself together!
He smiled. “You heard Angus coming in?”
“Yes, sir,” said Mairi.
“Couldn't sleep?”
“No, sir.”
Why, he wondered, didn't she question him about what had happened? Or did she know? She must, of course. She seemed indeed full of warm, secret, and desperate conspiraciesâbut with the powerfully attractive innocence that springs out of real feeling. He watched her move about, swill at the tap a teapot that had obviously been swilled before, for there were no leaves in it. She never looked at him. Her face was dumb with the oppressive consciousness of his presence. As the hum rose in the kettle, she stood patiently by the primus, her back to him.
A thought struck him. “Perhaps you could take it out yourself?” he suggested.
She hesitated.
“It is so pitch black that I thought perhaps I could do it for you. But if you can manage all right yourself?⦔
“I should be thankful if you could take it out,” she said in clear but low tones.
“Certainly. And, look here, what about buttering some biscuits or something?” He followed her to the cupboard and was slicing the brown loaf she gave him when Lady Marway came in. Mairi turned out the primus and put the full teapot on top of its hot ring.
“A good strong cup, Mairi?”
“Yes, ma'm. It's nice and strong.”
“Will you fetch him in or what?”
They both looked at Lady Marway. Then Harry looked at Mairi.
“I thought of taking it over,” said Mairi.
“I'm taking it over,” said Harry. “He's tiredâand might not care toââ”
Lady Marway agreed.
Mairi got a milk pail to carry the tea, but Lady Marway made her fill two thermos flasks and put them, together with the sandwiches, into a small basket, which swung lightly from Harry's hand as he set out on the hundred yards or so to the garage.
It was on this short trip that he began to understand the incredible nature of Angus's feat. If he had not had the edge of the road to guide his toes, he might quite easily have missed the garage. As it was he struck his waving hand sharply against the lime wall. Then he crept along it to the off gable-end, where an outside stone stairs went up to the loft floorâremains of an earlier age, when the garage had been a stable.
He heard their voices as he went up, feeling his way. They were loud and unguarded, charged with a life their employers never or rarely saw. It was their laughter that hit Harry, that brought him to a standstill, deliberately listening.
“God, I fell twenty feet if I fell an inch,” said Angus. “I thought it was all up. And, do you know, even as I was falling, I was mad! It was the damnedest funniest thing you ever knew.” He laughed.
“It was the hell of a place to attempt, that,” said Alick.
“I know. I knew that. But it's a queer thing that happens to you. You start off, with every muscle strung up, feeling, feeling out, until you're trembling like a held horse and you know you'll never do it. Then you get wild and curse the mist and the night and everything You could have heard me far enough!⦠Then you get past that. You don't give a tinker's curse. You go like a drunk man. Remember the night at Corr Inn when Sandy Innes, full as a piper, crossedââ”
“Yes.”
“There should have been death that night.”
“There should. But tell me, didn't you see the mist coming? Why didn't you at least cross over until you got on the near side so thatââ”
“I know. I said that. But would he listen? Damned the bit! Look here, he has offered me two pounds if he gets King Brude! Don't say a word, for heaven's sake. He's going to get him or die. Do you know that we were making for the march
beyond
Benuain? I said to him. âThat's the farthest point of our march.' âIs it?' he said, like that. What's a march? He's a bââr to go! That's the only thing that's frightening me now. Lord, I am tired. Look at my bloody legs jumping!” He laughed.
Harry hit the stone steps with his toes and then shouted, “Hallo, there!”
There was silence until he got to the top, then the door was pulled open and quickly closed behind him to keep the mist out. A single candle was burning on the floor, between two floor beds, with pipes and matches about it.
“Don't move,” said Harry, as Angus sat up. “I've brought you some tea.”
“Oh, that's too much, sir,” said Angus in his quiet polite voice.
“I've brought two flasks, so you can have some too, Alick. And some sandwiches. Here you are. I hope you're feeling all right?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Angus. “It was just in the warm room, after the drop of whiskyâI got light-headed a little.” His eyes were glittering.
“I know, very annoying,” said Harry. “You've got a real robber's cave here,” and he looked around into the shadows at vague junk.
“It serves a turn,” Alick said.
“I bet you there's been many a good night here,” Harry suggested.
“Oh well,” said Alick, smiling also.
There was silence. “I don't know how on earth you managed to get here, Angus. I hope I hit the house going back!”
“It's very thick,” said Angus, holding a fistful of the bedclothes.
“Well, wire into it. Good-night.”
“Good-night, sir.”
Alick came after him. “Watch your feet on the steps,” he said.
“Oh, that's all right.”
Alick was at his side at the foot of the steps. Harry protested but Alick walked beside him, until they felt the bulk of the house loom against them. Harry stopped.
“What are we going to do, Alick?”
“Maclean will be here with the first of the daylight. You should have a rest until then, sir. Sleep if you can.”
“There's nothing can be done?”
“Nothing. I may take a bit of a walk around, myself, butââ”
“Where will you go?”
“Oh, nowhere much. Angus and I were talking it over. I know the ground well. It's a question of wondering what Mr. Smith might do. But Maclean will arrange everything that's proper.”
“Look here,” said Harry, “have you told Maclean?”
“Not yet. I'll have to go over. I'll tell him you've all decided to go to bed. Angus is very worried.”
“Is he?”
“Yes. He's a little beside himself.”
“Oh.” Harry stood in the silence. Then it began to come out of him. “Look here, Alick, I'm desperately worried myself. It'sâit'sâyou know. It's at the back of my mind, that vision you had. I'm sorry toâto bring it up again. But I wish I could get my mind quite clear on it. You see, I must, not only for my own peace of mind, but becauseââ” The silence struck him. “Alick!⦔ There was no answer. He plunged forward a step or two and felt the air where Alick's voice had been. But Alick himself was gone.
For a moment or two Harry was madly angry. He even started for the loft. He would have shouted Alick's name peremptorily, if it hadn't been for those in the house who might hear. But after a few quite reckless paces, he stopped.
Like fate, the silence seemed adequate to the occasion!
His sharp irony bit into him. For he realised what he had been on the point of doing. Once or twice in a day-dream, he had thought: Assuming it was Geoffrey, would it not be possible so to arrange affairs that Geoffrey could be recalled to London urgently and thus destroy any possibility of the vision's being fulfilled? Seemed a simple way out. He even arranged how it might be done. If only he could be dead sure it was Geoffrey's funeral! Was Alick himself absolutely dead sure?
All in a moment again, he had wanted to know with an intense urgency. Deep in some primal part of him, he believed in the vision!
Talk about the grip of superstition! Geoffrey was right.
He stood there, unable to go either to the loft or into the house.
He could feel the mist searching out his ear-drums. His face turned in the direction of the forest, and he thought of Geoffrey impotently squirming in the clammy stuff, getting colder and colder till the marrow grew cold and the teeth clattered, and his face grew death-grey. If only his impatient spirit would keep him to the one place. “I fell twenty feet if I fell an inch.” But would it? Was he that kind?
Or would four men carry him home?
He turned to the house, angry with himself, deeply angry. He did not mind being fantastic or cynical with himself or with anyone else, but there was a limit!⦠And all the time further back in his mind he knew that a man did die, that every man died; apprehended it with the awful solemn simplicity of a child.
He struck the kitchen door and went in. Mairi was still here, and though she pretended to be doing things, he knew she was merely waiting.
“They're all right,” he said cheerfully. “I think the feed should do them good.”
“I'm glad of that,” she answered simply.
“Yes. No need for worry.” There was a human silence for a little. “You go to bed, Mairi, and get some sleep.”
“All right,” she said.
A fine girl, with a shy, real woman-warmth. The sort of companion a man wanted at such a moment. Game to the last, self-forgetting, and always there. He found himself lingering. He wanted some of that warmth, wanted its understanding, its comfort. So he said at once, “Good-night, Mairi. Go to bed now!” and walked out of the kitchen and into the sitting-room, where they were all waiting for him.
“Angus is pretty done up, feeling bad about having come home.” He was smiling, almost casually.
“Has Maclean been told?” Sir John asked.
“Alick is going over to tell him. They'll start out at the dawn. I think we should get some sleep.”
“Will they come here?” George asked.
“I should think so,” said Harry. “You and I should be ready, anyway.”
“Goodo!” said George.
“Bed it is, then,” said Lady Marway. “Come on, girls. Off you go.” Her firm good sense was appreciated, and within a quarter of an hour, the room was dark.
Harry got entangled in his sleep with a shroud, and when the vivid experience awoke him, he imagined a perceptible greyness in the direction of the window. He listened but heard no movementâthough a ghostly populous movement still went on in his mind. He struck a match and found it was five o'clock. The dawn should be coming.
He lay back, wide awake, with that early morning consciousness which can be so bodiless and sensitive and often full of optimism. The shroud he had seen was still almost tangible, its white folds between the outer and the inner eye, to be ignored or focused.
Yes, that's it! he thought, remembering how Alick had muttered about four men carrying a dead body “in its shroud”. That was what Alick had said, when the vision had passed and he had questioned him. But now Harry began to wonder if he had not actually heard the words “in its shroud” for the first time in his dream. This effect of double-consciousness, of hearing something and imagining he had heard it before in the same circumstances, was common enoughâparticularly in the shape of seeing things, like new places. Yet, of course, he knew Alick had said itâthough exactly how, in what specific sentence, he could not be certain.
The disquieting thing, behind it all, wasâthat the business of a shroud was to cover things over. The shroud in his dream with its stream-lined folds was like something painted by a Watts to cover over the beauty of the world. It enshrouded a figure, who was the beauty of the world. There is never anything sentimental in a dream. Harry would see the figure when the shroud was drawn back from the face. Alick's hand began to draw back the shroud. He wanted to stop himâyet could not move, held in such a horror that it awoke him.
So he actually had not seen Helen's dead face under the shroud, but he must have imagined it, at that moment or some other, in a half-legendary, Rossetti-like death beauty, for the pale image of it swam in upon him now.
Supposing it was not Geoffrey at all
,
but Helen?
In the extreme stillness of the morning, he heard a movement downstairs, and at once swung out of bed, lit a candle, and dressed.
Cook, Mairi, and the kitchen-maid, Ina, were in the lamplit kitchen when he entered. No one else was downstairs. He addressed Cook and asked her if Maclean had called.
“No one has called,” she answered, “but someone threw up pebbles at the girls' window.” She was a dark-haired medium-sized woman of nearly sixty, capable, and domineering, but “good-hearted enough when it comes up her back”, as Ina had once put it grudgingly. Ina had lank fair hair, and rather angular gestures, could make a moody mouth and flash blue eyes, looked brainless when sulking, and could play with children for long enough. Mairi was making sandwiches, and as she glanced up at him, Harry gave her a smile and a nod. Cook noted it. It was always useful, she found, to have a few disciplinary observations up one's sleeve.
Harry went up to George's door, opened it, and entered. George stirred and shot up in bed, staring at Harry's face behind the light he carried. “I say! Have I slept in?”
“No,” said Harry. “But the maids are getting stuff ready in the kitchen. Maclean or someone has been along.”
“Goodo! Hanged if I could get to sleepâand then wasn't I sure to pop off at the psychic moment!” He was getting into his trousers by the time Harry had lit his candle. “I won't be a shake.”
“You needn't bother waiting,” Harry said to her. “I'll take out the tea.”
“Oh,” said Helen and paused; “all right,” and she walked out.
Dismissed! thought Harry, and felt the swift hurt in Helen's mind. He had never scored so directly over her, so cruelly. He heard her footsteps pause and go on. Pulling herself together!
He smiled. “You heard Angus coming in?”
“Yes, sir,” said Mairi.
“Couldn't sleep?”
“No, sir.”
Why, he wondered, didn't she question him about what had happened? Or did she know? She must, of course. She seemed indeed full of warm, secret, and desperate conspiraciesâbut with the powerfully attractive innocence that springs out of real feeling. He watched her move about, swill at the tap a teapot that had obviously been swilled before, for there were no leaves in it. She never looked at him. Her face was dumb with the oppressive consciousness of his presence. As the hum rose in the kettle, she stood patiently by the primus, her back to him.
A thought struck him. “Perhaps you could take it out yourself?” he suggested.
She hesitated.
“It is so pitch black that I thought perhaps I could do it for you. But if you can manage all right yourself?⦔
“I should be thankful if you could take it out,” she said in clear but low tones.
“Certainly. And, look here, what about buttering some biscuits or something?” He followed her to the cupboard and was slicing the brown loaf she gave him when Lady Marway came in. Mairi turned out the primus and put the full teapot on top of its hot ring.
“A good strong cup, Mairi?”
“Yes, ma'm. It's nice and strong.”
“Will you fetch him in or what?”
They both looked at Lady Marway. Then Harry looked at Mairi.
“I thought of taking it over,” said Mairi.
“I'm taking it over,” said Harry. “He's tiredâand might not care toââ”
Lady Marway agreed.
Mairi got a milk pail to carry the tea, but Lady Marway made her fill two thermos flasks and put them, together with the sandwiches, into a small basket, which swung lightly from Harry's hand as he set out on the hundred yards or so to the garage.
It was on this short trip that he began to understand the incredible nature of Angus's feat. If he had not had the edge of the road to guide his toes, he might quite easily have missed the garage. As it was he struck his waving hand sharply against the lime wall. Then he crept along it to the off gable-end, where an outside stone stairs went up to the loft floorâremains of an earlier age, when the garage had been a stable.
He heard their voices as he went up, feeling his way. They were loud and unguarded, charged with a life their employers never or rarely saw. It was their laughter that hit Harry, that brought him to a standstill, deliberately listening.
“God, I fell twenty feet if I fell an inch,” said Angus. “I thought it was all up. And, do you know, even as I was falling, I was mad! It was the damnedest funniest thing you ever knew.” He laughed.
“It was the hell of a place to attempt, that,” said Alick.
“I know. I knew that. But it's a queer thing that happens to you. You start off, with every muscle strung up, feeling, feeling out, until you're trembling like a held horse and you know you'll never do it. Then you get wild and curse the mist and the night and everything You could have heard me far enough!⦠Then you get past that. You don't give a tinker's curse. You go like a drunk man. Remember the night at Corr Inn when Sandy Innes, full as a piper, crossedââ”
“Yes.”
“There should have been death that night.”
“There should. But tell me, didn't you see the mist coming? Why didn't you at least cross over until you got on the near side so thatââ”
“I know. I said that. But would he listen? Damned the bit! Look here, he has offered me two pounds if he gets King Brude! Don't say a word, for heaven's sake. He's going to get him or die. Do you know that we were making for the march
beyond
Benuain? I said to him. âThat's the farthest point of our march.' âIs it?' he said, like that. What's a march? He's a bââr to go! That's the only thing that's frightening me now. Lord, I am tired. Look at my bloody legs jumping!” He laughed.
Harry hit the stone steps with his toes and then shouted, “Hallo, there!”
There was silence until he got to the top, then the door was pulled open and quickly closed behind him to keep the mist out. A single candle was burning on the floor, between two floor beds, with pipes and matches about it.
“Don't move,” said Harry, as Angus sat up. “I've brought you some tea.”
“Oh, that's too much, sir,” said Angus in his quiet polite voice.
“I've brought two flasks, so you can have some too, Alick. And some sandwiches. Here you are. I hope you're feeling all right?”
“Yes, thank you,” said Angus. “It was just in the warm room, after the drop of whiskyâI got light-headed a little.” His eyes were glittering.
“I know, very annoying,” said Harry. “You've got a real robber's cave here,” and he looked around into the shadows at vague junk.
“It serves a turn,” Alick said.
“I bet you there's been many a good night here,” Harry suggested.
“Oh well,” said Alick, smiling also.
There was silence. “I don't know how on earth you managed to get here, Angus. I hope I hit the house going back!”
“It's very thick,” said Angus, holding a fistful of the bedclothes.
“Well, wire into it. Good-night.”
“Good-night, sir.”
Alick came after him. “Watch your feet on the steps,” he said.
“Oh, that's all right.”
Alick was at his side at the foot of the steps. Harry protested but Alick walked beside him, until they felt the bulk of the house loom against them. Harry stopped.
“What are we going to do, Alick?”
“Maclean will be here with the first of the daylight. You should have a rest until then, sir. Sleep if you can.”
“There's nothing can be done?”
“Nothing. I may take a bit of a walk around, myself, butââ”
“Where will you go?”
“Oh, nowhere much. Angus and I were talking it over. I know the ground well. It's a question of wondering what Mr. Smith might do. But Maclean will arrange everything that's proper.”
“Look here,” said Harry, “have you told Maclean?”
“Not yet. I'll have to go over. I'll tell him you've all decided to go to bed. Angus is very worried.”
“Is he?”
“Yes. He's a little beside himself.”
“Oh.” Harry stood in the silence. Then it began to come out of him. “Look here, Alick, I'm desperately worried myself. It'sâit'sâyou know. It's at the back of my mind, that vision you had. I'm sorry toâto bring it up again. But I wish I could get my mind quite clear on it. You see, I must, not only for my own peace of mind, but becauseââ” The silence struck him. “Alick!⦔ There was no answer. He plunged forward a step or two and felt the air where Alick's voice had been. But Alick himself was gone.
For a moment or two Harry was madly angry. He even started for the loft. He would have shouted Alick's name peremptorily, if it hadn't been for those in the house who might hear. But after a few quite reckless paces, he stopped.
Like fate, the silence seemed adequate to the occasion!
His sharp irony bit into him. For he realised what he had been on the point of doing. Once or twice in a day-dream, he had thought: Assuming it was Geoffrey, would it not be possible so to arrange affairs that Geoffrey could be recalled to London urgently and thus destroy any possibility of the vision's being fulfilled? Seemed a simple way out. He even arranged how it might be done. If only he could be dead sure it was Geoffrey's funeral! Was Alick himself absolutely dead sure?
All in a moment again, he had wanted to know with an intense urgency. Deep in some primal part of him, he believed in the vision!
Talk about the grip of superstition! Geoffrey was right.
He stood there, unable to go either to the loft or into the house.
He could feel the mist searching out his ear-drums. His face turned in the direction of the forest, and he thought of Geoffrey impotently squirming in the clammy stuff, getting colder and colder till the marrow grew cold and the teeth clattered, and his face grew death-grey. If only his impatient spirit would keep him to the one place. “I fell twenty feet if I fell an inch.” But would it? Was he that kind?
Or would four men carry him home?
He turned to the house, angry with himself, deeply angry. He did not mind being fantastic or cynical with himself or with anyone else, but there was a limit!⦠And all the time further back in his mind he knew that a man did die, that every man died; apprehended it with the awful solemn simplicity of a child.
He struck the kitchen door and went in. Mairi was still here, and though she pretended to be doing things, he knew she was merely waiting.
“They're all right,” he said cheerfully. “I think the feed should do them good.”
“I'm glad of that,” she answered simply.
“Yes. No need for worry.” There was a human silence for a little. “You go to bed, Mairi, and get some sleep.”
“All right,” she said.
A fine girl, with a shy, real woman-warmth. The sort of companion a man wanted at such a moment. Game to the last, self-forgetting, and always there. He found himself lingering. He wanted some of that warmth, wanted its understanding, its comfort. So he said at once, “Good-night, Mairi. Go to bed now!” and walked out of the kitchen and into the sitting-room, where they were all waiting for him.
“Angus is pretty done up, feeling bad about having come home.” He was smiling, almost casually.
“Has Maclean been told?” Sir John asked.
“Alick is going over to tell him. They'll start out at the dawn. I think we should get some sleep.”
“Will they come here?” George asked.
“I should think so,” said Harry. “You and I should be ready, anyway.”
“Goodo!” said George.
“Bed it is, then,” said Lady Marway. “Come on, girls. Off you go.” Her firm good sense was appreciated, and within a quarter of an hour, the room was dark.
Harry got entangled in his sleep with a shroud, and when the vivid experience awoke him, he imagined a perceptible greyness in the direction of the window. He listened but heard no movementâthough a ghostly populous movement still went on in his mind. He struck a match and found it was five o'clock. The dawn should be coming.
He lay back, wide awake, with that early morning consciousness which can be so bodiless and sensitive and often full of optimism. The shroud he had seen was still almost tangible, its white folds between the outer and the inner eye, to be ignored or focused.
Yes, that's it! he thought, remembering how Alick had muttered about four men carrying a dead body “in its shroud”. That was what Alick had said, when the vision had passed and he had questioned him. But now Harry began to wonder if he had not actually heard the words “in its shroud” for the first time in his dream. This effect of double-consciousness, of hearing something and imagining he had heard it before in the same circumstances, was common enoughâparticularly in the shape of seeing things, like new places. Yet, of course, he knew Alick had said itâthough exactly how, in what specific sentence, he could not be certain.
The disquieting thing, behind it all, wasâthat the business of a shroud was to cover things over. The shroud in his dream with its stream-lined folds was like something painted by a Watts to cover over the beauty of the world. It enshrouded a figure, who was the beauty of the world. There is never anything sentimental in a dream. Harry would see the figure when the shroud was drawn back from the face. Alick's hand began to draw back the shroud. He wanted to stop himâyet could not move, held in such a horror that it awoke him.
So he actually had not seen Helen's dead face under the shroud, but he must have imagined it, at that moment or some other, in a half-legendary, Rossetti-like death beauty, for the pale image of it swam in upon him now.
Supposing it was not Geoffrey at all
,
but Helen?
In the extreme stillness of the morning, he heard a movement downstairs, and at once swung out of bed, lit a candle, and dressed.
Cook, Mairi, and the kitchen-maid, Ina, were in the lamplit kitchen when he entered. No one else was downstairs. He addressed Cook and asked her if Maclean had called.
“No one has called,” she answered, “but someone threw up pebbles at the girls' window.” She was a dark-haired medium-sized woman of nearly sixty, capable, and domineering, but “good-hearted enough when it comes up her back”, as Ina had once put it grudgingly. Ina had lank fair hair, and rather angular gestures, could make a moody mouth and flash blue eyes, looked brainless when sulking, and could play with children for long enough. Mairi was making sandwiches, and as she glanced up at him, Harry gave her a smile and a nod. Cook noted it. It was always useful, she found, to have a few disciplinary observations up one's sleeve.
Harry went up to George's door, opened it, and entered. George stirred and shot up in bed, staring at Harry's face behind the light he carried. “I say! Have I slept in?”
“No,” said Harry. “But the maids are getting stuff ready in the kitchen. Maclean or someone has been along.”
“Goodo! Hanged if I could get to sleepâand then wasn't I sure to pop off at the psychic moment!” He was getting into his trousers by the time Harry had lit his candle. “I won't be a shake.”
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