The Shadow (4 page)

That he was not a native was clear on the instant, apart from his tie. Good afternoon, he said, and smiled. I said good afternoon. I was not really afraid. I mean I never thought of the murder. But something in me told me to back away, to get home, and to do it with polite indifference as the surest way. Yet it was for a moment awfully difficult. We agreed it was a lovely day. I got turned round, looking about the trees in a way that excluded him. I am not without training in this business! Then sideways I gave him the cool nod of farewell and, taking the middle of the narrow path where no-one could walk beside me, I began strolling back.

He was walking behind me. I became terribly conscious of him and angry. I had to suppose there was no real reason why he should not walk behind me if he was going my way. But at least he might have kept farther from my heels. This was hardly a bus-stop. Unfortunately my physical strength wasn't enough to keep this mood and myself going. So I stopped on the inner edge of the path, looking with private interest up the hillside so that he might pass. Shall I get them for you? he asked. I did not know what he meant. Before I could look at him coldly, he climbed up and plucked some bluebells (harebells to you). This was excruciating. I walked on. He started down upon me and presented the bluebells. His brown eyes had glints in them. No thanks, I said, please keep them for yourself. And I said it in such a way as left no doubt I meant him to keep to himself. He laughed—not loudly but with a horrible sort of understanding. Men with his eyes have that sort of understanding of women. The laugh was not horrible, it was, what is so much more horrible, delicious. I went hot. I felt my face burn. I had the absurd but paralysing notion that he was going to spring on me. He was gathering himself. His right hand came up and across his breast. The seam under his shoulder was burst for three inches. As his face followed his hand I saw a red streak on his neck—a flesh wound. He stuck the bluebells in his button-hole and looked at me from under his eyebrows.

I went on, I hardly know how. It would be quite impossible to give you any idea of the state I was in. The sight of the wound had made me think of the murderer. I could not look round. Had I looked round and found him following me, I would have screamed and collapsed gibbering.

I think the worst spot was just after I got out of the wood and knew he was not following me. But I didn't run. Then the tremors and trembles so came on me that it was like being drunk and you can't keep going any more. But I kept going because to stop now, to sit down, would be to invite him, to cry to him. And the wood was still holding him, but only just.

At last I got so far that what held me to the wood snapped like an elastic and I fell. How the earth took me, like rain! To sink in—ah, Ranald, it's lovely. I wish I could tell you. Perhaps—some day.

Light in body, and light in the head too, there I was leaving the moor and coming towards our Wood (yours and mine though you've never been there). I thought of the Mound, the juniper bushes, the bank that breathes of the warm south. There I would rest. For I hadn't rested long on the moor. And now the pine trees are at hand and I am looking for the sagging place in the old wire fence that you step over. And then—one of the tree trunks moved. Buttons on a blue tunic. A body. It was a policeman. The policeman looked at me. I was staring at his eyes. I knew the eyes. They were grey like thistledown.

I can only believe I was so bereft of sense and motion that I looked merely astounded. Anyway I stood on nothing, staring at him. A curious hard glimmer came into his face, oddly selfconscious. He was like one caught playing a queer part in an unexpected place. He said good day and I didn't answer. I couldn't. And then, Ranald, he asked me:
Did you see anyone about?

Oh I knew instantly, overwhelmingly, what he meant. It went crying through me, through the world. My brows gathered.
Anyone?
I repeated.
No.

Before such bewildered innocence he shifted on his feet. He could not have seen me, could not have seen what happened in the trees of the gorge. He could not see the gorge from here, not until he went nearly a mile onto the moor. All that went through my head like lightning.

We are looking for someone—we have reason to believe he may be somewhere about, he said. As I had nothing to say he looked me over and added, You are staying at Greenbank with Mrs. Robertson? I said Yes. Then he asked me, Have you been far? I said I had been to the Altfey burn. The grey eyes considered me. It might be as well, he suggested, if you were more careful; he may be a bit off his head.

I had to move, but in going over the fence I stumbled badly. He at once supported me, kept me on my feet. I didn't mean to frighten you, he said.

I was trembling and he made to accompany me. I gathered all my resources, thanked him, and smiled. I went on, knowing that if I let go he would be by my side. I shut everything out of my mind except the queer discovery I had made. I hung onto that as to a rope. Remember my telling you in the letter about the thistledown how my imagination produced the face of a schoolmaster with thistledown eyes?
It was the policeman's face.
He is the policeman in the village of Elver, over two miles away. Once Aunt Phemie and I passed him there. Aunt Phemie greeted him. He had looked at me then in the way policemen do. Only that once, and I had forgotten him entirely—until I saw his grey eyes by the wood.

When I went to earth I was pretty bad, Ranald. It was a touch of hysteria. I let go only for a minute or two. I fought my best. I was desperately afraid the policeman would come on me. But I kept the bits together. And strangely enough it was not so much what I had just been through as that last spell in London—up it came again.

You would think I had had enough for one day. I was now quite damp with sweat. But when I felt for my hankie to clear my eyes I found I hadn't got it. I had lost it. The last time I could remember using it was just after I had entered the gorge. It had been warm walking in the sun. I could remember crushing it in my hand. It's a small square of linen with my initials hand-stitched in one corner. I need not tell you how I imagined its being picked up by the man in the gorge. A curious thing to find in his pocket on being searched. I felt trussed.

I couldn't finish that last letter. My pen wouldn't make any more writing. I can't even read it over. To muff such an opportunity of a dramatic finish, too! We were so merry this afternoon, Aunt Phemie and myself. Aunt Phemie is a darling. You'll love her. I took her in hand over some old frocks of hers. I told her she was becoming dowdy and a perfect fright. How can she expect to impress Will, I asked, if she does not appear at least once in the day as the lady of the manor. For it is really quite a decent farmhouse. All of five bedrooms and an enormous bathroom which may have been another bedroom once. I can't say I ever liked pitch pine. I think it is because when I was tiny and went to church first, the tall straight-backed pews—like stalls—and the pulpit and the steps up to it and everything except the whitewashed walls were pitch pine. Everyone was so silent and strange, too, and when—being about six—you had to say something and whispered, you were shushed by so solemn a face that for the first time you realised the awfulness of guilt and crime. Yet deep in your little heart you did not believe it and rebelled, for you knew that the crime and the guilt were outside you, like something in the air and not in you. They were in this awful large place, the church, and you looked up under your brows, and down, and you wanted to go away home and you felt the tears surging up. Before the wail could come out a sweet was put in your hand and you fought the good fight because in a vague way you realised the kind bribery of that sweet. Not that it altered anything. Yet the pitch pine is, I think, a more particular memory, because one Sunday I found that by pressing my hot little hand against the wood, I could make it stick just a little. The pew had no doubt been newly varnished. This was an interesting game during the interminable sermon and probably I sat fairly still for a long time with my own thoughts. Besides, I had on a new frock and that is something you just can't forget. You have to live up to it. With a new frock you are the little lady, you have responsibilities. Wonderful, isn't it? And then the sermon was over, I got my feet on the floor—and the frock stuck to the seat! It came away with a faint tear—and the colour of the varnished wood was brown in my mind.

The doors and the mantelpieces and the skirtings and the cupboards are all pitch pine, but Aunt Phemie has wallpaper and carpets that tone with, it, taking away the grim bareness and giving quite an impression of warmth. And some of the bedroom doors, inside, are painted cream, with fittings to match. My bedroom has two windows, one to the south looking across the valley, and the other in the west wall through which I can see the steading and, beyond, the tops of spruce trees that are still in the grey evening and quite translated in the moonlight as if the earth had its own mute Christmas trees, and between and beyond them, very far away, a glimpse of blue mountain tops—real tops, like cones, not the great flat squatting mountains beyond the hill burn. There is so much sun in this bedroom that I love it. When I come into it I feel lifted up. I cannot tell you how real a feeling this is. Of course the room
is
lifted up in a way. I mean, you see over the valley and far away. It's like being up in the air, on a tree. Perhaps that delicious childhood feeling? If ever I have a house of my own, I should like it to be on a slope, facing south. Never on a flat. Perhaps it was just poverty that sent all the lovable philosophers to the roofs so that their thoughts could fly away past the myriads of chimney pots. Blessed poverty! And dear Ranald!

Do you mind my writing to you all this? But I'm not really asking because of course I've decided I'll only send you what I think is good for you! Aunt Phemie thinks I come up to write letters, or read, and every afternoon—she is imperative about this—to rest for an hour in bed. She thinks this treatment is doing me great good because sometimes—when happiness has come to me all in a moment from writing to you—I bolt downstairs to worry her. (I bolted after the end of the last paragraph—after writing the haunting and distinguished word Ranald.) Anyway, I always come up here to write to you. I could not do it anywhere else.

This is a room of my own. And another astonishing thing about writing you is this. Most times the writing just flows from me. Thoughts teem in my head, each one touching off a hundred others, and if I could get them down fast enough it would be a spate. This is bewildering to me at times, in a wild sort of amazing way, because I once tried to write, seriously, to make a living, as you know. Then I laboured. How I laboured! And what came was dead. I had bits, but when I got them together they were dead. I perfectly understood why editors returned the poor things. The made-up toys that won't go. Children are impatient with them—except maybe the odd child who thinks they look sad. You'll always find that odd one. Perhaps he's the saviour.

My saviour was
The Last Word.
The word the woman has—in fashion and the arts. Aunt Phemie loves the brilliant illustrations and thinks I must be very clever to hold down a job on the staff. What really astonishes her is how the affair comes out every month all new and fresh as paint. “Wizard” is no slang of yesteryear to her.

Aunt Phemie is really a remarkable woman. Let me describe her to you (for I feel well to-day and won't allow any horrid thought within arm's length). But first let me dispel a nagging notion, raised a moment ago. I agree that this isn't real writing, in any literary way. I'm not fancying myself, dear mind-piercing Ranald. Easy, facile. Very well. But if I had to write it, such as it is, as a literary composition, a creation, a work, it would make me sweat and would go dead. It's because I'm writing to you. Do you understand, Ranald dear? Must I tell you that love is the wizard? Is that perhaps the ultimate secret of all great writing? And not only love of a person. Though always at the core, whether of a tree or a mountain (or a political world theory!), what man finds—or loses—is himself. That's no new thought. But oh, how suddenly new to me!

May I now proceed, please, with Aunt Phemie? Thank you. Aunt Phemie is not the stout comfortable motherly woman upon whose bosom you can lay your tired head. Such women are the hope and mainstay of the world. When analysis and logic founder in their own despair, the motherly woman abides. From her I see myriads of little feet running down the world in a bright green morning—while you half suspect me of malice! Let me tell you something I have found out. The clever-clever ones in our set affected to despise the comfortable motherly woman as a brainless cow. Actually—they
hated
her. Think that one out.

Aunt Phemie wasn't long a mother. She is comfortably slim and though well over forty the gold in her hair hasn't faded much. I suppose gold doesn't. She is a tirelessly energetic worker and yet can stand quite still. She is over the average height for women, in fact exactly my own height, for we measured; but when I tried something of mine on her it wouldn't meet, and I'm no willow wand though a loss in weight produces the willowy sensation.

She was a school teacher. You would never think so until, perhaps, you heard her discussing farm business with the grieve. For of course the farm is hers. When her husband was killed within a year of their marriage, she did not go back to teaching. Everyone thought she would sell out and go back, but she didn't. I think she loved her husband. Not the wild first love of the poets, but the kind that grows unbeknownst, like a plant or a tree. The other day we were going over the garden and in one corner came on a young rowan, all of four feet, complete with fruit. She had never noticed it before. She was surprised that such a growth could have taken place without her noticing it. We laughed. It was a delightful moment.

Like myself, she comes of farming stock, and at the country school the boy who one day became her husband always had an eye for her. Aunt Phemie does not open her heart, but she can smile and there is a humour in her smile that makes it the most charming self-contained thing you ever saw. Boys at country schools don't wear their hearts on their sleeves. At a country school the profounder emotions are severely disciplined. To admit that you were courting someone—oh boy! There are fights enough in the usual way. A healthy healthy place. And possibly he was shy, because deep in him he was strong and sensitive.