Second Sight (5 page)
Authors: Neil M. Gunn
Harry's smile broke into a soft friendly laugh. These two young eyes would now be watching him with the glancing lights he had once seen in the clear, frightened eyes of a fawn. Lord, this sort of life did produce a capacity for sensitive vision! He had better look out or he might presently be seeing through things! That moment by the rock-pool he had seen exactly what Alick's body would look like drowned in the pool. In fact, if they found the body so drowned.â¦
But this was getting fantastic, so he lit a cigarette and went on to the swing-bridge that spanned the stream. As it heaved with him he held on to the two wire ropes, the boards coming up to meet his drunken feet. This put him into normal good humour, and when he met a tall man whose reddish hair was turning sandy-grey, he greeted him in a friendly way. Immediately the man answered, in his quiet voice, he knew he was Alick's father. There was the same stillness of the body, the slow movement, the friendly yet reserved expression. Very courteous, very dignified, but with that tendency to turn the shoulder, to look away, which was new to Harry. He had seen it in Maclean, but there had thought it the natural habit of a man used to consulting sky and hill for indications of weather.
“You are Mr. Macdonald, I think,” Harry said, smiling. “I should know you from your son, Alick.”
“Yes, I am,” replied Mr. Macdonald, looking at him.
“My name is Kingsley. Your son and I stalk together.”
“I am glad to meet you, sir,” said Mr. Macdonald and shook Harry's extended hand gravely and yet with a curious inherent warmth that touched Harry's heart.
“Thinking of tackling your corn?”
“Well, I was thinking of putting an edge on the old scythe.” Harry followed the downward glance and saw the long, sinewy forearm with its covering of reddish glistening hairs and the powerful tough hand. As he looked up again, he caught the head of a woman drawn rapidly back inside the front door, less than twenty yards away, for they were standing by the old thatched barn.
“A good crop this year?”
“Yes. We have no complaints. It was a good summer.”
“For once!”
“Well, perhaps, yes.” His smile had a shy humour. “It is not always so good indeed.”
“Better than last year, anyhow!”
They went on talking for a little time, Harry wondering how he could ask after Alick. Mr. Macdonald gave an opening by saying, “You are not on the hill to-day?”
“No, I thought I'd better have a day off. I think you appreciate the hill better by having a day off now and then.”
“Perhaps you will then,” said Mr. Macdonald politely.
“Yes. So I thought I'd have a stroll round your country instead.”
It was going to be difficult, because he had the clear feeling that Alick was not here and that the father was wondering how he, Harry, came to be here, seeing Alick was supposed to be on the hill with him.
He was deciding to move on, and had actually taken a tentative step or two away, when the head appeared at the door again, and was in a hesitant and yet impulsive manner followed by the whole woman.
She was if anything under middle height, dark, with dark eyes, and stout. She glanced at Harry once, then spoke to her husband: “Won't you ask the gentleman in for a glass of milk?”
Something in her approach, in the way her expression seemed to melt in kindness, decided Harry to accept at once. “Thank you very much,” he said, with his quickest smile. Merriment edged his voice. He told how dry he was, making a joke of it.
She showed him into the parlour, and this he regretted, not merely because it was small and crammed with awkward bits of furniture and photographs and smelt of Sunday clothes, but because he wanted to be in the ease of the kitchen with its peat fire. He took off his cap, and presently Mr. Macdonald took off his cap too, while Mrs. Macdonald came with a jug and a glass on a round metal tray. The milk was creamy and delicious and he paid no attention to remarks he had once heard (though he involuntarily remembered them) about dirt and insanitary conditions.
In the dim light (there were flower pots inside the small window) and stuffy air, with Mr. Macdonald sitting awkwardly upright on a cloth-bottomed dining-room chair and Mrs. Macdonald at first standing and then sitting on the edge of a similar chair, Harry lolled in the hair-bottomed arm-chair with an almost exciting sense of discomfort, his face to the window.
There was a tremendous contrast between husband and wife, both of whom were probably over sixty (the man possibly nearer seventy). The woman's hair, combed smoothly from a middle parting, was still quite black. Harry, out of a natural interest in his sporting ground, had read a bit about the racial history of the Highlands, and some tentative thoughts were suggesting themselves automatically when the woman said, “We felt sure you would have been on the high ground to-day, seeing Alick did not come home last night.”
“No,” Harry replied, smiling, and drank again. “This is delicious milk. No, thanksâreally, I couldn't take any more. Thank you ever so much. No, I didn't go to-day. I took a day off. The others left quite early. They are going far in.”
“Didn't I tell you?” said Mr. Macdonald drily.
“Does he not come home at night sometimes?” Harry asked conversationally.
“It's very rarely indeed he stays away,” she replied. “Sometimes, if they are late on the hill at night or want to make a very early start, he sleeps over at the Lodge. But he hasn't done that”âshe looked at her husbandâ“for three years, isn't it?”
“About that.” He smiled with a humoured knowingness. “She does not get to sleep very well until she hears him coming in!”
Harry laughed.
“I don't mind him being away at night at allâso long as I know not to expect him. Last night I gotâI don't know.” She looked confused for a moment and then smiled, asking Harry to excuse her. She was full of those quick tentative kindnesses and emotions.
“Well, if you don't mind my saying so, I am very happy to have your son's company. We get on extremely well together. And he has taught me to use my eyesâand perhaps my mindâbetter than any teacher I can think of. He is really a fine fellow.”
“That is very kind of you, Mr. Kingsley,” she said, her voice pitched low and quick in gratitude, in pride, her eyes on her knees where her hands were.
“It's only the truth,” he said, getting up. “Well, that was a very pleasant rest.” And, after unhurried farewells, he turned his back on Corbeg, his brows immediately wrinkling, his voice coming audibly, “Now where in the name of God can that fellow have gone?”
For he had not slept at the Lodge and he was not on the hill. A real concern touched Harry now, a waking fearânot unlike the fear he had had in that wretched dream last night.
Manifestly something had gone wrong, or Alick wouldn't have put that mother of his to such concern. And by not turning up at the Lodge this morning the silly ass was simply asking for it, for was it not inevitable that someone should go to his home and spill the news? It's a search party he's asking for! thought Harry angrily. And then his mounting fear was suddenly allayed by remembering Angus's return that morning with the information that Alick was not at home. For it was now perfectly obvious that Angus had not gone near Alick's home. Why? Because he knew beforehand that Alick was not there. Which implied that he knew where Alick had been last night. Which further impliedâthat there was no need to contemplate tragedy quite yet!
Harry smiled to himself. These intricacies of the mind! The fact that one could depend on the other like that, to understand and cover up! Typical of them somehow. And probably they had cursed each other as well.
Out of sight of the cottages, he pulled up and was gazing in front of him when Geoffrey's words came loudly into his mind: “Blind drunk!”
And there it was, no doubt of it! Geoffrey had cut clear to the truth. Which was annoying to Harry at that moment. Alick had been after drink, had tried brutally to force Mairi to give him drink, had failed, and so had gone and got blind drunk. The process was clear enough to Geoffrey. No doubts or refinements needed. Swept all feelings and emotional difficulties and fears, all the dark or tragic patterns of mind, into the dustbin. An apprehension of the overpowering force of Geoffrey's complacency swept Harry's mind so strongly that it left behind it for one moment a wrung-out, dry hatred.
Then he went automatically towards Corr Inn, which lay over three miles to the north-east, at a road junction.
It looked a lonely enough place, as he saw it from a last low hill-crest. Any sort of revel could be carried on there at night. And drunk men could sing and stagger around it and lie and get up and fight or mutter their inmost thoughts to each other and sleep or disappear into the moor, and no one in the wide bright world be a bit the wiser. When Harry saw it, its dark-slated roof lay low upon it, and no life moved about it.
No life moved over all that vast landscape of moor and hill, flowing in lines of smooth beauty. If beauty was the word? If beauty could lie at ease beneath these lines, could inhabit such barrenness? If beauty, then beauty with a bowed head and an empty mind, the wind whistling through its vacant mind, and dying away in a sigh. The wind came in a soft eddy, warmed from the lower ground, and his vacant mind was filled with the fragrance of wild bee's honey. It was the heather, of course, which was everywhere in full bloom. Leagues of purple under the grey sky, mounting to dark horizons. Harry dropped in the heather and lay flat out and closed his eyes and let the wind pass over his face and through his hair.
He did not actually fall asleep, but lay on that borderland where all is ease and a quiet forgetting, where to forget is to be full of peace, of release, of a wandering like the wind that wanders and yet never goes. It was a trick from the sunny meadows of southern England he knew as a boy, and from one place in particular, where the wind came blowing from a distant common of gorse, golden flaming gorse, whose toonear scent could almost make him sick or make him swoon.
Ten minutes and he got up, completely emptied of all humours, and then down he went until he got by the bank of the small and almost dried-up stream, which he followed with his boyhood's eyes, noting chance wild flowers and once or twice being startled to a standstill at the brilliant enamels of vagrant beetles.
So that he approached the inn with open frank eyes, remarking to himself conscientiously that what he desired now was a mug of good beer.
The place appeared tidy enough, if bare and unused looking. A few vegetables in the garden, but more weeds, with straggling unpruned currant bushes against a low drystone wall. And the usual rank-looking rhubarb. He tried the door but found it locked; knocked; and waited some time before it opened and disclosed a strongly built man of middle years with thick black hair neatly combed, an unshaven but ruddy and fresh face, and eyes that were taking him in completely while the mouth said “Good morning!” and the whole man waited.
Harry returned the greeting and asked if he might have some beer.
“Well,” said the landlord, with a friendly, even an engaging smile, “we haven't opened yet. Eleven o'clock is opening time, you know.” He looked at Harry.
Harry looked at his watch. “It's after ten now,” he said, “and I think I'm slow.”
“Well, now, perhaps you are. But have you come far?”
“I have come from Corbreac Lodge. And that's far enough, surely.”
For one instant Harry thought the dark eyes winced, but in the next he decided he must have been deceived for the man's expression had merely become astonished.
“On foot?”
“Yes.”
“Please come in.”
But this was getting fantastic, so he lit a cigarette and went on to the swing-bridge that spanned the stream. As it heaved with him he held on to the two wire ropes, the boards coming up to meet his drunken feet. This put him into normal good humour, and when he met a tall man whose reddish hair was turning sandy-grey, he greeted him in a friendly way. Immediately the man answered, in his quiet voice, he knew he was Alick's father. There was the same stillness of the body, the slow movement, the friendly yet reserved expression. Very courteous, very dignified, but with that tendency to turn the shoulder, to look away, which was new to Harry. He had seen it in Maclean, but there had thought it the natural habit of a man used to consulting sky and hill for indications of weather.
“You are Mr. Macdonald, I think,” Harry said, smiling. “I should know you from your son, Alick.”
“Yes, I am,” replied Mr. Macdonald, looking at him.
“My name is Kingsley. Your son and I stalk together.”
“I am glad to meet you, sir,” said Mr. Macdonald and shook Harry's extended hand gravely and yet with a curious inherent warmth that touched Harry's heart.
“Thinking of tackling your corn?”
“Well, I was thinking of putting an edge on the old scythe.” Harry followed the downward glance and saw the long, sinewy forearm with its covering of reddish glistening hairs and the powerful tough hand. As he looked up again, he caught the head of a woman drawn rapidly back inside the front door, less than twenty yards away, for they were standing by the old thatched barn.
“A good crop this year?”
“Yes. We have no complaints. It was a good summer.”
“For once!”
“Well, perhaps, yes.” His smile had a shy humour. “It is not always so good indeed.”
“Better than last year, anyhow!”
They went on talking for a little time, Harry wondering how he could ask after Alick. Mr. Macdonald gave an opening by saying, “You are not on the hill to-day?”
“No, I thought I'd better have a day off. I think you appreciate the hill better by having a day off now and then.”
“Perhaps you will then,” said Mr. Macdonald politely.
“Yes. So I thought I'd have a stroll round your country instead.”
It was going to be difficult, because he had the clear feeling that Alick was not here and that the father was wondering how he, Harry, came to be here, seeing Alick was supposed to be on the hill with him.
He was deciding to move on, and had actually taken a tentative step or two away, when the head appeared at the door again, and was in a hesitant and yet impulsive manner followed by the whole woman.
She was if anything under middle height, dark, with dark eyes, and stout. She glanced at Harry once, then spoke to her husband: “Won't you ask the gentleman in for a glass of milk?”
Something in her approach, in the way her expression seemed to melt in kindness, decided Harry to accept at once. “Thank you very much,” he said, with his quickest smile. Merriment edged his voice. He told how dry he was, making a joke of it.
She showed him into the parlour, and this he regretted, not merely because it was small and crammed with awkward bits of furniture and photographs and smelt of Sunday clothes, but because he wanted to be in the ease of the kitchen with its peat fire. He took off his cap, and presently Mr. Macdonald took off his cap too, while Mrs. Macdonald came with a jug and a glass on a round metal tray. The milk was creamy and delicious and he paid no attention to remarks he had once heard (though he involuntarily remembered them) about dirt and insanitary conditions.
In the dim light (there were flower pots inside the small window) and stuffy air, with Mr. Macdonald sitting awkwardly upright on a cloth-bottomed dining-room chair and Mrs. Macdonald at first standing and then sitting on the edge of a similar chair, Harry lolled in the hair-bottomed arm-chair with an almost exciting sense of discomfort, his face to the window.
There was a tremendous contrast between husband and wife, both of whom were probably over sixty (the man possibly nearer seventy). The woman's hair, combed smoothly from a middle parting, was still quite black. Harry, out of a natural interest in his sporting ground, had read a bit about the racial history of the Highlands, and some tentative thoughts were suggesting themselves automatically when the woman said, “We felt sure you would have been on the high ground to-day, seeing Alick did not come home last night.”
“No,” Harry replied, smiling, and drank again. “This is delicious milk. No, thanksâreally, I couldn't take any more. Thank you ever so much. No, I didn't go to-day. I took a day off. The others left quite early. They are going far in.”
“Didn't I tell you?” said Mr. Macdonald drily.
“Does he not come home at night sometimes?” Harry asked conversationally.
“It's very rarely indeed he stays away,” she replied. “Sometimes, if they are late on the hill at night or want to make a very early start, he sleeps over at the Lodge. But he hasn't done that”âshe looked at her husbandâ“for three years, isn't it?”
“About that.” He smiled with a humoured knowingness. “She does not get to sleep very well until she hears him coming in!”
Harry laughed.
“I don't mind him being away at night at allâso long as I know not to expect him. Last night I gotâI don't know.” She looked confused for a moment and then smiled, asking Harry to excuse her. She was full of those quick tentative kindnesses and emotions.
“Well, if you don't mind my saying so, I am very happy to have your son's company. We get on extremely well together. And he has taught me to use my eyesâand perhaps my mindâbetter than any teacher I can think of. He is really a fine fellow.”
“That is very kind of you, Mr. Kingsley,” she said, her voice pitched low and quick in gratitude, in pride, her eyes on her knees where her hands were.
“It's only the truth,” he said, getting up. “Well, that was a very pleasant rest.” And, after unhurried farewells, he turned his back on Corbeg, his brows immediately wrinkling, his voice coming audibly, “Now where in the name of God can that fellow have gone?”
For he had not slept at the Lodge and he was not on the hill. A real concern touched Harry now, a waking fearânot unlike the fear he had had in that wretched dream last night.
Manifestly something had gone wrong, or Alick wouldn't have put that mother of his to such concern. And by not turning up at the Lodge this morning the silly ass was simply asking for it, for was it not inevitable that someone should go to his home and spill the news? It's a search party he's asking for! thought Harry angrily. And then his mounting fear was suddenly allayed by remembering Angus's return that morning with the information that Alick was not at home. For it was now perfectly obvious that Angus had not gone near Alick's home. Why? Because he knew beforehand that Alick was not there. Which implied that he knew where Alick had been last night. Which further impliedâthat there was no need to contemplate tragedy quite yet!
Harry smiled to himself. These intricacies of the mind! The fact that one could depend on the other like that, to understand and cover up! Typical of them somehow. And probably they had cursed each other as well.
Out of sight of the cottages, he pulled up and was gazing in front of him when Geoffrey's words came loudly into his mind: “Blind drunk!”
And there it was, no doubt of it! Geoffrey had cut clear to the truth. Which was annoying to Harry at that moment. Alick had been after drink, had tried brutally to force Mairi to give him drink, had failed, and so had gone and got blind drunk. The process was clear enough to Geoffrey. No doubts or refinements needed. Swept all feelings and emotional difficulties and fears, all the dark or tragic patterns of mind, into the dustbin. An apprehension of the overpowering force of Geoffrey's complacency swept Harry's mind so strongly that it left behind it for one moment a wrung-out, dry hatred.
Then he went automatically towards Corr Inn, which lay over three miles to the north-east, at a road junction.
It looked a lonely enough place, as he saw it from a last low hill-crest. Any sort of revel could be carried on there at night. And drunk men could sing and stagger around it and lie and get up and fight or mutter their inmost thoughts to each other and sleep or disappear into the moor, and no one in the wide bright world be a bit the wiser. When Harry saw it, its dark-slated roof lay low upon it, and no life moved about it.
No life moved over all that vast landscape of moor and hill, flowing in lines of smooth beauty. If beauty was the word? If beauty could lie at ease beneath these lines, could inhabit such barrenness? If beauty, then beauty with a bowed head and an empty mind, the wind whistling through its vacant mind, and dying away in a sigh. The wind came in a soft eddy, warmed from the lower ground, and his vacant mind was filled with the fragrance of wild bee's honey. It was the heather, of course, which was everywhere in full bloom. Leagues of purple under the grey sky, mounting to dark horizons. Harry dropped in the heather and lay flat out and closed his eyes and let the wind pass over his face and through his hair.
He did not actually fall asleep, but lay on that borderland where all is ease and a quiet forgetting, where to forget is to be full of peace, of release, of a wandering like the wind that wanders and yet never goes. It was a trick from the sunny meadows of southern England he knew as a boy, and from one place in particular, where the wind came blowing from a distant common of gorse, golden flaming gorse, whose toonear scent could almost make him sick or make him swoon.
Ten minutes and he got up, completely emptied of all humours, and then down he went until he got by the bank of the small and almost dried-up stream, which he followed with his boyhood's eyes, noting chance wild flowers and once or twice being startled to a standstill at the brilliant enamels of vagrant beetles.
So that he approached the inn with open frank eyes, remarking to himself conscientiously that what he desired now was a mug of good beer.
The place appeared tidy enough, if bare and unused looking. A few vegetables in the garden, but more weeds, with straggling unpruned currant bushes against a low drystone wall. And the usual rank-looking rhubarb. He tried the door but found it locked; knocked; and waited some time before it opened and disclosed a strongly built man of middle years with thick black hair neatly combed, an unshaven but ruddy and fresh face, and eyes that were taking him in completely while the mouth said “Good morning!” and the whole man waited.
Harry returned the greeting and asked if he might have some beer.
“Well,” said the landlord, with a friendly, even an engaging smile, “we haven't opened yet. Eleven o'clock is opening time, you know.” He looked at Harry.
Harry looked at his watch. “It's after ten now,” he said, “and I think I'm slow.”
“Well, now, perhaps you are. But have you come far?”
“I have come from Corbreac Lodge. And that's far enough, surely.”
For one instant Harry thought the dark eyes winced, but in the next he decided he must have been deceived for the man's expression had merely become astonished.
“On foot?”
“Yes.”
“Please come in.”
Chapter Four
H
arry was late for lunch, and still later he found Helen in the sitting-room.
“Hallo!” he exclaimed, his eyes brightening at sight of her. “You didn't go with them?”
“No,” she said, leaning back in her chair and letting her arm fall by her side in a characteristically frank gesture.
“I say!” He was still looking at her.
“I somehow didn't feel like itânot a whole day of it,” and she stirred and sat up.
“No, not a whole day,” he said, as he pushed round the leg of the neighbouring armchair with a lazy foot and sat down. “Have one?” And holding the light to her cigarette he murmured, “I was glad to see you,” as though some sort of explanation of the way he had looked at her was necessary.
“Well, I'm glad to see you, I don't mind confessing.”
“And here we are!”
“Like conspirators.”
“Exactly. I wish I had known you weren't going with them.” He tried to speak casually, but it was difficult to subdue the note of excitement that had come from nowhere. She was really very good-looking at the moment, very vivid, with a warmth in her skin and a depth of brightness in her clear eyes.
“If I had been up as early as usual, I might have caught you. But I overslept.”
“Did you?”
She smiled. “You're astonished! You haven't found out anything about Alick?”
“No. Can't trace him at all. I don't know what to make of it.” He smiled. “I really had a rotten night last night. Quite abysmal.”
“I know.” She nodded. “I had a nightmare.”
“Had you?” He laughed. “There is something in what Geoffrey says: you can work up a situation. You know, there was a moment during the night when I became so sensitive that I heard the wind crying round the house and crying away out on to the moors.” He shrugged. “It's not exactly that you hear
voices
in the wind, but that you
hear
the wind itselfâas if you were a small boy, listening to it, with a strange dread, in a lonely country house. But I can't explain.”
“Do you have that feeling, too?”
“Why, do you?”
She nodded. They both smiled.
“Do you ever feel,” she asked, “a gust of wind going away up into the skyâand curving overâinto a sort of domeâlike a vast parachuteâgoing away upâand you hold downâyou snuggle down into your bed? It's not altogether unpleasantâif you have nothing on your mind. But if you wake up out of a horrid dream and hear it.⦔
“What was your dream about?”
“Oh wellâpretty complicatedâand pretty awful.”
“Was it?”
“Uhm.” She nodded.
“Why won't you tell it?
Was I in it?”
“As a matter of fact, you were.”
“Was I horrid?”
“No.”
“Purely as a matter of research, what was I?”
“Purely as a matter of fact, I hung on to you. But thenâI was beside myself with terror.”
“I happened to be a handy sheet anchor in the wind?”
“You
can
be helpful.”
“Good! Andâpurely in the dream of courseâhow did I take your hanging on to me?”
“Again, as a matter of fact, you took it very well. You were really very nice indeed.”
“That's a relief.”
“Why?” Her glance was quick.
“Wellâyou wouldn't have liked me to be nasty to youâin such circumstances.”
“You meanâwhen you might naturally have been?”
“Not
me
naturally. It's
you
who dreamed, remember.”
“I don'tâquite seeâ”
“Never mindâso long as I was nice to you. Was I very nice?”
She found she could not quite carry off this persiflage, and, in a slight embarrassment, got up. “Oh, you were quite all right, quite helpful. I then looked at the time.” She looked at her wrist-watch. “It was three o'clock.”
“That was when I looked at the time.” Harry got up. “We must have been singularly in tune.”
“To the same idea, perhapsânot necessarily to each other.”
“Oh, naturally. I should not presume for a moment to go outside the idea.”
They both laughed, excitedly. They had often pulled each other's leg, but never quite to this extent.
Then Helen's expression became serious, as a shadow follows light. “Was Alick in your dream?”
“Yes,” responded Harry quietly. “Was he in yours?”
She nodded. “Yes. His faceâlooking back over his shoulderâas he went away into the nightâ¦awfulâit tore my heart.”
“Did it?”
“Yes.” She took a restless step or two. “He has a strange giftâwhen you think of it afterwardsâof making you see things.” She looked at Harry with all her natural frankness. “I understood you so well when you said that about enchantment last night. He points to something in the grassâa momentâand goes on. Or he stops and you hear a bird. âChaffinch,' he says, and goes on. Time and again, with such ease, such a feeling of leisure, as if time had no end, until.⦔
“The scales fall off your eyes.”
“That was a dreadfully hackneyed thing for me to say, wasn't it? And before them all, too. It made me squirm in bed. But that's exactly what happens all the same, isn't it?”
“Yes. And scales off your ears.”
“Yes. Do you know”âand her voice caught a note of wonderâ“I do believe there is enchantment. I meanâreally enchantment. And the best of it all is that you
know
it isn't a delusion. On the contrary, you know that it is
the
real thing. That it is exact and realâwhere before everything was vague or blurred. Youâ¦oh, I can't explain. Imagine someone, colour-blind, suddenly seeing all the coloursâthe real colours, vivid and lovelyâgrowingâin sunlight. Like thatâonly, too, it's somehow full of fun andâand you find yourself having a small laugh to yourself.” She looked at him as if she were going to have a small laugh to herself. “Or have I gone too far for you?” And her smile held the sound of a small, secret laugh.
“You
have
gone too far,” he said solemnly.
“It seems,” she said thoughtfully, “that when I go as far as Alick I go too far for you.” It was a pity.
“You are enchanting me.”
She opened her eyes on him. “I'm what?”
“I accuse you of enchanting me.”
“Harry, how horrid of you!”
They faced each other, challengingly, until her expression ran into a rare smile and her splutter of laughter broke through. She turned away and, as he followed her, got a chair between them.
“No horse-play, please. Remember we are grown up.”
“Hmf!” He shrugged, and his voice thickened in harsh satire. “Fancy having all the tricksâat your age!”
“Tricks!” She flamed upon him. “What do you mean? How dare you say that to me?”
“Well, it's true.” Even the twist of his lips looked ugly. “You are an enchantressâwith all the tricks.”
“Tricks!” She was hurt to the quick and made to walk past him, but he got in her way.
“Don't be a fool,” he suggested. “What on earth do you expect me to say?”
“Certainly nothing but what you believe to be the truth. I will thank you to get out of my way.”
“Going all dramatic?”
“I am not dramatic. I am hurt.”
“Sorry.” And then he smiled. “Hang it all, Helen, there's a limit to what you can do and what a fellow can stand. And anyway you must understand that you can't go on talking about enchantment like that, about colour and bird-singing and enchantment. It's simply not done. You forget that we are English. We keep that for books on bird life and plants.” He paused. “Perhaps that is why the English write the best books in the world on birds and wild flowers andâand rock gardens. It is a profound thought.”
“You're being pretty clever,” she said doubtfully, her eyes on him.
“No.” He shook his head. “Simple truth. Think it out. This affair here has set me thinking. You see, a fellow like Alick does not get his kick out of
reading
aboutâwell, all this rather magnificent environment of bens and glens and so on. He gets the kick direct. And we needn't go out of our way to misunderstand or sentimentalise the folk hereabouts. That's an old romantic trick. They are realistsâwith a feel for what is real in life like the feel of earth in your hand. I mean, the actual business of living, of being alive, in all its hidden twists.” He shrugged. “Oh, I don't know.”
She still had her eyes on him, for he had taken a step or two in the difficult labour of definition, and after a moment she asked directly, “What do you think has happened to Alick?”
He looked at her frankly. “I just don't know. That's why I know I can see only a very little way into this.” Then he remembered Geoffrey. “But Geoffrey was quite sure. He said Alick went and got blind drunk.”
Her face cleared. “How characteristic of Geoffrey!”
“I hope Geoffrey was right,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“If Alick only got blind drunk, he'll turn up.”
“Harry. Do you think he might haveââ” Her voice sank.
“God knows,” said Harry. “I went over to Corbeg this morning to see if I could spot him. I ran into his father by an old outhouse, carrying his scythe, like old man Time. A quiet-spoken old fellow, keeps his head up, eyes steady and looking beyond you, and that grave rather attractive dignity. Sort of puts you on your best manners. Then the mother came out: short and stout and dark, but busked all tight and hardy, like one of the really old inhabitants, Iberian or something. Actually they were two pretty good samples of the small dark and tall fair. Have you ever read anything about the ethnology of the Highlands?”
“No.”
“Oh well, you seeââ”
“Tell meâwhat happened?”
He chuckled. “Well, she had those dark, shy, halfembarrassed eyesâas if she were so full of kindness that she was frightened to intrude it upon you. But you won't understand that.”
“Go on,” said Helen.
“So in I went and had her glass of milk and right creamy it was. I had completely forgotten how good milk tastes. Have you? But of course notâyou're young enough to remember. Well, we talked and I casually found out that Alick had not slept there last night. She had been a bit alarmed, but he said to her âI told you so', for apparently Alick has been known to sleep in the Lodge here, when there is a very early start. Very rarely, of course, but it's happened.”
“Didn't they wonder why youââ”
“I told them I was having a day off. But not the othersâwho were having a long day.”
“He didn't sleep here?”
“No. So remembering Geoffrey's âblind drunk', off I set for Corr Inn. I wish I could tell you what happened there, but I can't because it's only still working itself out in my mind. In the cleverest way the landlord made me tell him I was staying here and had walked on foot to the inn and so on. An extremely engaging fellow, simple as the black water you see in some of these tarns on the high-ground moor, anything but translucent, yet really clear enough. How astonished a fellow must be who drowns in one of them! I feel like the fellow who has just managed to crawl out.”
“I say, you are getting deep!”
“Bogged is the word. He played me like a trout. But onceâtwiceâI hit him.”
“Your metaphors are obscure.”
“You would hardly notice it. I was on the way home before I completely noticed it myself. I could not ask for Alick directly, so very cleverly I began asking if the stalkers and gillies came to this inn of his for a jollification, as it seemed an excellent place for it. Have you ever touched a snail when its feelers are out? Well, something in his expression, his eyes, went in like that. Momentarily isn't in it, of course. But there it wasâand in that moment he not only knew who I was, but what I was after, and I know quite positively that by this time he has contrived to warn Alick of my spying. Even at the time, it made me feel uneasy and mean. Remarkable, isn't it?”
She nodded. “I do understand that. I have had that sensation of their mind feeling you.”
“Invisible feelers. Yes.” His smile took a thoughtful twist. “Now normally one of two things may happenâthough I don't know quite how I know thisâwhen you hit the mind and it goes in like that: either the body may lash out at you dangerously
or
the body may go opaque and stupid-looking. And it is inclined to go stupidâto its superiors. We are its superiors.”
The quiet irony excited Helen and she moved about restlessly.
“Not that that happened,” Harry explained, “in the case of the landlord, of course, because he could cover up, not being personally involved. ButâI know I'm right, exactly as if he had demonstrated.”
Helen stopped. “And what are you going to do next?”
“Just wait. You cannot go against destiny.”
“You are not growing fatalist, are you?”
“No. I merely have an intuition that I should do nothing.”
“An intuition?”
“I am beginning to go like that. Pretty bad, isn't it?”
She turned away to the window and stared out.
“There's Alick,” she said quietly.
“Is it?” He did not move.
“And there's Father and Geoffrey.⦠A pony with a stag.”
“Only one stag?”
“Yes.”
“Geoffrey's?”
“I don't know.”
“Then it's your father's. Is Alick with them?”
“No, he's gone. Maclean is weighing the stag.”
Harry walked over to the window.
H
arry was late for lunch, and still later he found Helen in the sitting-room.
“Hallo!” he exclaimed, his eyes brightening at sight of her. “You didn't go with them?”
“No,” she said, leaning back in her chair and letting her arm fall by her side in a characteristically frank gesture.
“I say!” He was still looking at her.
“I somehow didn't feel like itânot a whole day of it,” and she stirred and sat up.
“No, not a whole day,” he said, as he pushed round the leg of the neighbouring armchair with a lazy foot and sat down. “Have one?” And holding the light to her cigarette he murmured, “I was glad to see you,” as though some sort of explanation of the way he had looked at her was necessary.
“Well, I'm glad to see you, I don't mind confessing.”
“And here we are!”
“Like conspirators.”
“Exactly. I wish I had known you weren't going with them.” He tried to speak casually, but it was difficult to subdue the note of excitement that had come from nowhere. She was really very good-looking at the moment, very vivid, with a warmth in her skin and a depth of brightness in her clear eyes.
“If I had been up as early as usual, I might have caught you. But I overslept.”
“Did you?”
She smiled. “You're astonished! You haven't found out anything about Alick?”
“No. Can't trace him at all. I don't know what to make of it.” He smiled. “I really had a rotten night last night. Quite abysmal.”
“I know.” She nodded. “I had a nightmare.”
“Had you?” He laughed. “There is something in what Geoffrey says: you can work up a situation. You know, there was a moment during the night when I became so sensitive that I heard the wind crying round the house and crying away out on to the moors.” He shrugged. “It's not exactly that you hear
voices
in the wind, but that you
hear
the wind itselfâas if you were a small boy, listening to it, with a strange dread, in a lonely country house. But I can't explain.”
“Do you have that feeling, too?”
“Why, do you?”
She nodded. They both smiled.
“Do you ever feel,” she asked, “a gust of wind going away up into the skyâand curving overâinto a sort of domeâlike a vast parachuteâgoing away upâand you hold downâyou snuggle down into your bed? It's not altogether unpleasantâif you have nothing on your mind. But if you wake up out of a horrid dream and hear it.⦔
“What was your dream about?”
“Oh wellâpretty complicatedâand pretty awful.”
“Was it?”
“Uhm.” She nodded.
“Why won't you tell it?
Was I in it?”
“As a matter of fact, you were.”
“Was I horrid?”
“No.”
“Purely as a matter of research, what was I?”
“Purely as a matter of fact, I hung on to you. But thenâI was beside myself with terror.”
“I happened to be a handy sheet anchor in the wind?”
“You
can
be helpful.”
“Good! Andâpurely in the dream of courseâhow did I take your hanging on to me?”
“Again, as a matter of fact, you took it very well. You were really very nice indeed.”
“That's a relief.”
“Why?” Her glance was quick.
“Wellâyou wouldn't have liked me to be nasty to youâin such circumstances.”
“You meanâwhen you might naturally have been?”
“Not
me
naturally. It's
you
who dreamed, remember.”
“I don'tâquite seeâ”
“Never mindâso long as I was nice to you. Was I very nice?”
She found she could not quite carry off this persiflage, and, in a slight embarrassment, got up. “Oh, you were quite all right, quite helpful. I then looked at the time.” She looked at her wrist-watch. “It was three o'clock.”
“That was when I looked at the time.” Harry got up. “We must have been singularly in tune.”
“To the same idea, perhapsânot necessarily to each other.”
“Oh, naturally. I should not presume for a moment to go outside the idea.”
They both laughed, excitedly. They had often pulled each other's leg, but never quite to this extent.
Then Helen's expression became serious, as a shadow follows light. “Was Alick in your dream?”
“Yes,” responded Harry quietly. “Was he in yours?”
She nodded. “Yes. His faceâlooking back over his shoulderâas he went away into the nightâ¦awfulâit tore my heart.”
“Did it?”
“Yes.” She took a restless step or two. “He has a strange giftâwhen you think of it afterwardsâof making you see things.” She looked at Harry with all her natural frankness. “I understood you so well when you said that about enchantment last night. He points to something in the grassâa momentâand goes on. Or he stops and you hear a bird. âChaffinch,' he says, and goes on. Time and again, with such ease, such a feeling of leisure, as if time had no end, until.⦔
“The scales fall off your eyes.”
“That was a dreadfully hackneyed thing for me to say, wasn't it? And before them all, too. It made me squirm in bed. But that's exactly what happens all the same, isn't it?”
“Yes. And scales off your ears.”
“Yes. Do you know”âand her voice caught a note of wonderâ“I do believe there is enchantment. I meanâreally enchantment. And the best of it all is that you
know
it isn't a delusion. On the contrary, you know that it is
the
real thing. That it is exact and realâwhere before everything was vague or blurred. Youâ¦oh, I can't explain. Imagine someone, colour-blind, suddenly seeing all the coloursâthe real colours, vivid and lovelyâgrowingâin sunlight. Like thatâonly, too, it's somehow full of fun andâand you find yourself having a small laugh to yourself.” She looked at him as if she were going to have a small laugh to herself. “Or have I gone too far for you?” And her smile held the sound of a small, secret laugh.
“You
have
gone too far,” he said solemnly.
“It seems,” she said thoughtfully, “that when I go as far as Alick I go too far for you.” It was a pity.
“You are enchanting me.”
She opened her eyes on him. “I'm what?”
“I accuse you of enchanting me.”
“Harry, how horrid of you!”
They faced each other, challengingly, until her expression ran into a rare smile and her splutter of laughter broke through. She turned away and, as he followed her, got a chair between them.
“No horse-play, please. Remember we are grown up.”
“Hmf!” He shrugged, and his voice thickened in harsh satire. “Fancy having all the tricksâat your age!”
“Tricks!” She flamed upon him. “What do you mean? How dare you say that to me?”
“Well, it's true.” Even the twist of his lips looked ugly. “You are an enchantressâwith all the tricks.”
“Tricks!” She was hurt to the quick and made to walk past him, but he got in her way.
“Don't be a fool,” he suggested. “What on earth do you expect me to say?”
“Certainly nothing but what you believe to be the truth. I will thank you to get out of my way.”
“Going all dramatic?”
“I am not dramatic. I am hurt.”
“Sorry.” And then he smiled. “Hang it all, Helen, there's a limit to what you can do and what a fellow can stand. And anyway you must understand that you can't go on talking about enchantment like that, about colour and bird-singing and enchantment. It's simply not done. You forget that we are English. We keep that for books on bird life and plants.” He paused. “Perhaps that is why the English write the best books in the world on birds and wild flowers andâand rock gardens. It is a profound thought.”
“You're being pretty clever,” she said doubtfully, her eyes on him.
“No.” He shook his head. “Simple truth. Think it out. This affair here has set me thinking. You see, a fellow like Alick does not get his kick out of
reading
aboutâwell, all this rather magnificent environment of bens and glens and so on. He gets the kick direct. And we needn't go out of our way to misunderstand or sentimentalise the folk hereabouts. That's an old romantic trick. They are realistsâwith a feel for what is real in life like the feel of earth in your hand. I mean, the actual business of living, of being alive, in all its hidden twists.” He shrugged. “Oh, I don't know.”
She still had her eyes on him, for he had taken a step or two in the difficult labour of definition, and after a moment she asked directly, “What do you think has happened to Alick?”
He looked at her frankly. “I just don't know. That's why I know I can see only a very little way into this.” Then he remembered Geoffrey. “But Geoffrey was quite sure. He said Alick went and got blind drunk.”
Her face cleared. “How characteristic of Geoffrey!”
“I hope Geoffrey was right,” he said quietly.
“What?”
“If Alick only got blind drunk, he'll turn up.”
“Harry. Do you think he might haveââ” Her voice sank.
“God knows,” said Harry. “I went over to Corbeg this morning to see if I could spot him. I ran into his father by an old outhouse, carrying his scythe, like old man Time. A quiet-spoken old fellow, keeps his head up, eyes steady and looking beyond you, and that grave rather attractive dignity. Sort of puts you on your best manners. Then the mother came out: short and stout and dark, but busked all tight and hardy, like one of the really old inhabitants, Iberian or something. Actually they were two pretty good samples of the small dark and tall fair. Have you ever read anything about the ethnology of the Highlands?”
“No.”
“Oh well, you seeââ”
“Tell meâwhat happened?”
He chuckled. “Well, she had those dark, shy, halfembarrassed eyesâas if she were so full of kindness that she was frightened to intrude it upon you. But you won't understand that.”
“Go on,” said Helen.
“So in I went and had her glass of milk and right creamy it was. I had completely forgotten how good milk tastes. Have you? But of course notâyou're young enough to remember. Well, we talked and I casually found out that Alick had not slept there last night. She had been a bit alarmed, but he said to her âI told you so', for apparently Alick has been known to sleep in the Lodge here, when there is a very early start. Very rarely, of course, but it's happened.”
“Didn't they wonder why youââ”
“I told them I was having a day off. But not the othersâwho were having a long day.”
“He didn't sleep here?”
“No. So remembering Geoffrey's âblind drunk', off I set for Corr Inn. I wish I could tell you what happened there, but I can't because it's only still working itself out in my mind. In the cleverest way the landlord made me tell him I was staying here and had walked on foot to the inn and so on. An extremely engaging fellow, simple as the black water you see in some of these tarns on the high-ground moor, anything but translucent, yet really clear enough. How astonished a fellow must be who drowns in one of them! I feel like the fellow who has just managed to crawl out.”
“I say, you are getting deep!”
“Bogged is the word. He played me like a trout. But onceâtwiceâI hit him.”
“Your metaphors are obscure.”
“You would hardly notice it. I was on the way home before I completely noticed it myself. I could not ask for Alick directly, so very cleverly I began asking if the stalkers and gillies came to this inn of his for a jollification, as it seemed an excellent place for it. Have you ever touched a snail when its feelers are out? Well, something in his expression, his eyes, went in like that. Momentarily isn't in it, of course. But there it wasâand in that moment he not only knew who I was, but what I was after, and I know quite positively that by this time he has contrived to warn Alick of my spying. Even at the time, it made me feel uneasy and mean. Remarkable, isn't it?”
She nodded. “I do understand that. I have had that sensation of their mind feeling you.”
“Invisible feelers. Yes.” His smile took a thoughtful twist. “Now normally one of two things may happenâthough I don't know quite how I know thisâwhen you hit the mind and it goes in like that: either the body may lash out at you dangerously
or
the body may go opaque and stupid-looking. And it is inclined to go stupidâto its superiors. We are its superiors.”
The quiet irony excited Helen and she moved about restlessly.
“Not that that happened,” Harry explained, “in the case of the landlord, of course, because he could cover up, not being personally involved. ButâI know I'm right, exactly as if he had demonstrated.”
Helen stopped. “And what are you going to do next?”
“Just wait. You cannot go against destiny.”
“You are not growing fatalist, are you?”
“No. I merely have an intuition that I should do nothing.”
“An intuition?”
“I am beginning to go like that. Pretty bad, isn't it?”
She turned away to the window and stared out.
“There's Alick,” she said quietly.
“Is it?” He did not move.
“And there's Father and Geoffrey.⦠A pony with a stag.”
“Only one stag?”
“Yes.”
“Geoffrey's?”
“I don't know.”
“Then it's your father's. Is Alick with them?”
“No, he's gone. Maclean is weighing the stag.”
Harry walked over to the window.
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