by Nan Shepherd
He lay pondering the hugeness of life. Sometimes he was so weak that he cried. Nurses said to one another, ‘Poor fellow—that huge one in the corner. Crying like a baby. He has delusions.’
He fumed at their pity as he had fumed at ridicule in his boyhood; but in a gush of charity allowed himself even to be pitied. One could not refuse to meet other people halfway.
‘It’s because it’s so big,’ he tried to explain to one of the nurses.
‘Yes, I know,’ she answered, pressing his hand.
Of course she didn’t know. It wasn’t the war that was big, it was being alive in a world where wars happened—that was to say, in a world where there were other people, divinely different from oneself; whole Kingdoms of Heaven, clamouring to be taken by violence and loved in spite of themselves. No nurse could know that; but he permitted her to put her hand on his, and even when she pressed it he did not fling it off. But then he was so tired.
Some weeks later Garry left his valise at the station and set out to walk the four cross-country miles to Knapperley. Night had fallen—a night of war-time, unrelieved. Behind him, along the line of railway where the houses were clustered, dull blurs of light were visible; in front all was dark. Slowly the vast heaven detached itself from the earth. Trees took shape—bare, slender branches striking upward into the sky. It seemed as though out of the primal darkness the earth once more were taking form: an empty world, older than man, silent. In a while Garry became acutely aware of the silence. It burdened him. He stood to listen. A bird was stirring, dead dry leaves rustled in the beech hedge; far off, a dog barked. The lonely echo died, there was no wind, the world was still as dream. Life had not yet begun to be, man had not troubled the primordial peace. Strange stagnant world—he hated its complacency. Standing there on the ridge, dimly aware of miles of dark and silent land, Garry felt a sort of scorn for its quietude: earth, and men made from earth, dumb, graceless, burdened as itself.
‘This place is dead,’ he thought. The world he had come from was alive. Its incessant din, the movement, the vibration that never ceased from end to end of the war-swept territory, were earnest of a human activity so enormous that the mind spun with thinking of it. Over there one felt oneself part of something big. One was making the earth. Here there were men, no doubt, leading their hapless, misdirected, individual lives; but they were a people unaware, out of it. He felt almost angry that Lindsay should be dwelling among them. He knew from her letters that she was in Fetter-Rothnie, and, convalescent, had written her that he would come to Knapperley; but that her young fervour should be shut in this dead world annoyed him. She was too far from life. The reconstruction of the universe would not begin in this dark hole, inhabited by old wives and ploughmen.
But as he mounted farther into the night, the night, growing upon his consciousness, was a dark hole no longer. The sky, still dark, brooded upon a darker earth, but with no sense of oppression. Rather both sky and earth rolled away, were lost in a primordial darkness whence they had but half emerged. Garry felt himself fall, ages of time gave way, and he too, was a creature only half set free from the primordial dark. He was astonished at this effect upon himself, at the vastness which this familiar country had assumed. Width and spaciousness it always had, long clear lines, a far horizon, height of sky; yet the whole valley and its surrounding hills could have been set down and forgotten in the slum of the war territory from which he had crossed. All the generations of its history would not make up the tale of the fighting men.
He paused a little, contemplating that history. Fierce and turbulent men had made it: Picts and Celtic clansmen, raiders and Jacobites. Circles and sculptured stones, cairns and hill-forts, tall grim castellated strongholds, remained as witness to its past. In its mountain glens there were recesses, ledges at the waterside under overhanging crag a hundred feet in height, where fugitives had hidden from their foes; on its coasts dangerous caves, where smugglers had operated, caught the resounding seas. Craft put out and were tossed on the waters in adventures of piracy and merchandise and statesmanship. Fishermen knew its landmarks. Wrecks were strewn about its shores. Monarchs and chieftains had ridden its passes; a king had fled that way to his destruction, a queen watched the battle on which her fortune hung; and its men had gone to every land on earth following every career. Yet, a small land; poor; ill to harvest, its fields ringed about with dykes of stone laboriously gathered from the soil. Never before had Garry felt its vastness; and he paused now, watching and hearkening. A sound broke the stillness, faint bubble of a stream, the eternal mystery of moving water; and now the darkness, to his accustomed eyes, was no longer a covering, but a quality of what he looked upon. Waste land and the fields, in common with the arch of sky, and now a grandeur unsuspected in the day. Light showed them as they were at a moment of time, but the dark revealed their timeless attributes, reducing the particular to accident and hinting at a sublimer truth than the eye could distinguish. Garry felt for a moment as though he had ceased to live at the point in time where all his experience had hitherto been amassed.
He was recalled to his accidental point in time by a woman’s voice, shrill and clamorous, carrying across the night. A man’s voice answered, like a reverberating boom. Garry walked on. Knapperley was just ahead.
The dogs were on him as soon as he entered, but not before he had seen Miss Barbara, alone on the kitchen floor, in her swinging Lovat tweed, dancing a Highland fling. How she lifted her supple sinewy legs, and tossed her arms, and cracked her fingers! ‘That’s you, is it?’ her nod seemed to say as she glanced towards her nephew and went on with the step. Garry laughed, weary as he was, and swung into the dance. How much of the character of the land had not gone into this vigorous measure, which a hard-knit woman of fifty five was dancing alone on her kitchen floor in the middle of a world war, for no other reason than that she wanted to! But in a moment he caught his breath and sat down. Miss Barbara sat also, pulled a handful of raisins from her pocket and began to munch. She asked no questions of her nephew, accepting him as she accepted rain or a litter of pups.
‘That’s better than jazz, aunt.’
‘And what might jazz be?’
‘It’s a thing some people do.’
‘Don’t you come here, my lad, with your things some people do. This is a decent house.’
The man lay back, face seamed and drawn, eyes sunken, and looked at the house. Since the war began he had not come to Knapperley till then.
‘Not a mortal thing is changed. The war just hasn’t touched you, has it, aunt?’
To which she answered with an indignant flash, ‘Change and change enough. There’s nae near so many bodies about the roads. Tinkler bodies. There’s just nane ava, and they’re a terrible miss. I aye liked them coming in about for a sup and a crack. Many’s the collieshangie we’ve had in this very ingle—Jeemsie Parten that has nae teeth but on the Sabbath, and Tammas Hirn, he had aye a basket with trappin’ and aye time for a newse, and an auld orra body that hadna a name—pigware he brought, bowls and bonny jugs. I hinna had a new bowl since I kenna the time. And Johnnie Rogie, a little shauchlin’ craitur, but the king o’ them a’.’
Garry went to his room and fell asleep; but awoke in a little shivering violently. The bed—he might have known it—was damp. He dressed and crawled shaking down to the embers. The dogs stirred, but soon were quiet. An owl called. Miss Barbara made no sign; and for the rest of the night Garry sat by the blaze that he rekindled, staring into its heart and attempting to reconcile his aunt’s vivid enjoyment of the moment with the dark truth he had been thrust upon in his walk that evening, where time and the individual had ceased to matter.
FIVE
Problem set for Garry
Lindsay was on the moor next morning to meet her lover. She was glad that she had taken his letter herself from the postman, that the old women need not know. The five last empty weeks had collapsed, the moment was enough.
‘There are tassels on the larch, Garry. Look, and pur
ple osiers. And oh, do you smell the poplar? I forgot—you are laughing, you know all these places so much better than I. I have never been in the country in spring before.’
‘But now that I think of it, neither have I.’
‘Not here?’
‘Why, no. They were schoolboy holiday visits. Once or twice since, in midsummer.’
‘You’ve never bird’s-nested here?—I am so glad. Then I can show you things … These are the osiers.’
‘No matter what they are. They are too lovely to require a name.’
On the willows by the pool the catkins were fluffed, insubstantial, their stamens held so lightly to the tree that they seemed like the golden essence of its life escaping to the liberty of air. Once, as the two wandered in the wood, they saw a rowan, alone in the darkness of the firs, with smooth grey branches that gleamed in the sun. The tree had no seeming substance. It was like a lofty jet of essential light.
But farther into the wood, in a sheltered clearing, the sun blazed upon a woman, picking gleams from her feathery yellow hair. She was kneeling on the ground, her hands clasped together and her head thrown back. They could see that her eyes were squeezed close and her lips were moving.
‘Saying her prayers,’ cried Lindsay. ‘It’s Louie Morgan. She’s pi, you know.’
Louie continued to pray. They could hear now the words that issued from her lips. Bowing and smirking to an audience that was not there, Louie was petitioning: ‘I’m on the Fetter-Rothnie Committee—may I introduce myself? I’m on the Fetter-Rothnie Committee—may I introduce myself?’
Lindsay checked her gurgle of laughter. ‘But it’s a shame to laugh at her. Poor soul, she’s had so hard a time.’
‘How?’ Garry asked, carelessly; amused at the creature’s antics.
‘But don’t you know? Your friend David Grey.’
She told him the story of Louie’s betrothal.
There began for Garry at that moment the tussle that made his name a byword in Fetter-Rothnie.
‘Dave,’ he repeated stupidly. ‘Dave.’
He had shared rooms with David Grey when they were students at Glasgow Technical College. David’s death had touched him closely. Lindsay knew little of the depth and strength of that affection, of which indeed he had never spoken.
‘David Grey,’ he repeated. ‘That creature there.’
Louie was still becking and bowing, swaying upon her knees, with clasped hands and eyes squeezed close. The exhibition, which had been ludicrous, became offensive. But the eyes opened suddenly, and the antic creature scrambled, not ungracefully, to her feet.
Louie Morgan was a slight, manoeuvring figure, in the middle thirties. Her large eyes were melting and beautiful. She studied her movements of arm and throat. When a stranger asked the way of her, she heard him think, ‘What a beautiful girl! What poise! I am glad I missed my way. That is a face one must remember.’ She studied to have a face one must remember. She had solid respect in Fetter-Rothnie as the daughter of her father, who had been its minister; and of her mother, who made the tea at every Sale of Work and Social Meeting. As Jonathan Bannochie had said, in proposing her a vote of thanks at the last Congregational Meeting, ‘It would be a gey dry tyauve wantin’ the tea, and Mistress Morgan’s genius lies in tea.’ She had a further genius in her admiration for her only child. She thought Louie only a trifle less wonderful than Louie thought herself. Mrs Morgan was small, plain and collected. Louie, she said without a tinge of envy, took her charm and temperament from the father’s side.
As became the daughter of her father, Louie was devout. She carried a pocket Testament and read it on ostentatious occasions. She wanted to hear strangers think, ‘What beautiful piety! How fine the expression it gives the countenance!’ And it was always in her prayers that the perfect lovers of whom she dreamed made their appearance. Always when she reached a certain point in her petitions they appeared. ‘God bless father and mother … and all my little cousins … and make me a good girl—’ She had a vision of herself as a good girl, a charitable Princess giving alms to footsore men, and one of them saying, out of parched and swollen lips, ‘She is more radiant than the sun, and blesses what she looks on. It is she that the King my father sent me to seek.’ As she grew older, make me a good girl changed its wording, but the sentiment remained and so did the vision, changed also. Her prayers had long footnotes, in which she had visions of herself in all the splendid roles she pleaded with Heaven to let her play; and always a hero came, whose comment on herself she heard, and whom she answered. She was a missionary in a dangerous land, and a ferocious chieftain knelt sobbing at her feet. ‘You are more wonderful than all the gods of my people. Your God will be my God, and you shall be my queen.’ She was a nurse in hospital, and the sick and wounded blessed her name. A great surgeon saw her pass, noted her touch. An emergency operation must be performed. The man’s life hangs on it, he is delirious, fights, will not take the anaesthetic. ‘You will come, hold him.’ He is calm in a moment, his life is saved. ‘Yes, the first time I saw my wife she helped me with a critical case. Saved the man. She has a wonderful touch.’ Or perhaps the hero was diffident and would not speak. ‘I’m on the Fetter-Rothnie Committee—may I introduce myself?’ ‘Ah, beloved, had you not had the courage to speak to me that fateful day, how drab life would have been.’
The immediate words that broke upon her prayer, however, were not these; were not, indeed, intelligible. Aware merely of voices, she opened her eyes; then rose and faced the two intruders, flushing with satisfaction. She had always wanted to be discovered at prayer in the woods. Into the woods my Master went. She composed the face one must remember, and heard Lindsay and Captain Forbes think, ‘Her face is shining. It is by such devotion that the world is saved.’
Louie lifted her eyes from her subconscious play-acting to look at Captain Forbes.
‘How ugly he is! It must be years since I’ve seen him.’ Her satisfaction was marred. Garry’s face was working. He was still thinking, ‘That creature there.’ She felt an antagonism. Was it not a waste of effect? ‘The wrong sort of man to appreciate me. Life’s like that—never the right people.’ Distinctly, the wrong sort of man. Louie decided to have nothing to do with Captain Forbes; but immediately she tilted her head a little sideways and held out a hand. ‘I am so glad. And what was doing at the Front? Oh, Captain Forbes, now that we have you here; you must say a few words at our concert. Next week. Comforts for the troops, you know.’
‘Comforts? Oh yes, you protect yourselves against us with comforts, I believe.’
‘Protect—?’
‘Parcel us up your comforts, and then feel free to forget all about us.’
‘But, Captain Forbes! Linny, do tell him he is absurd.’
‘He always is. Garry, you’d better go to her concert and tell them about the comforts.’
‘Tell them—Good Lord, I will! But it won’t be a happy concert. You’d better not ask me, Miss Morgan. No, on the whole better not. Let’s get on, Linny. Good afternoon.’
‘So you won’t come?’ she called after them.
‘No, no. Lin, where did that gossip get a start? I hope it hasn’t spread far. What you told me, I mean. Who could have spread such a story? About David Grey.’
‘But it isn’t a story.’
‘Isn’t a story?’
‘Not a story. It’s true.’
‘No.’
‘Yes.’
‘It’ll need a jolly lot of comforts to protect me against that. Where did you get the tale?’
‘But, Garry—don’t you believe it?’
‘Comforts. Believe it? Did you know David Grey?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I did.’
‘But—’
‘David was the cleanest thing on God’s earth. And not killed, you know. Not a clean, sharp death. Rotted off. Diseased. To die like that! It’s an insult. A stupid, senseless, dirty joke. I wish they hadn’t added this to it. These scandalmongers. They must always be at somet
hing. This tale about an engagement. Another dirty joke. Senseless and dirty. Accusing him of moral disease, as though the physical were not enough.’
‘But she told me—’
Lindsay compelled him to understand that the story was no mere rumour. Louie herself asserted it.
‘Of all the brazen—Clawed him up from the dead and devoured him. I wish her joy of the meal.’
‘I can’t understand you, Garry. Why should you disbelieve her?’
‘Did you know David Grey?’
‘You know I—’
‘Well, I did. David was utterly incapable of fooling around with a woman he didn’t mean to marry. And utterly incapable of marrying a woman like that thing there. It’s obscene. See that tree there, Linny? It’s like phosphorescence on decaying fish. Evil look, hasn’t it?’
‘Why, it’s just the sun.’
It was the naked rowan they had seen before. Garry felt a poison in the air. He strode to and fro.
‘But your precious Louie shall disgorge. I’ll see to that. Give him back his character. In public, too.’
In their restless turning they came face to face again with Louie.
‘Captain Forbes, I am sure you will reconsider. It would be such an attraction for our concert.’
Garry stood swaying upon his parted feet A hand rumpled his forehead. He glared down. Like an ogre, Louie said. One did not fling liar at a woman: still, the thing had to stop.
‘I thought perhaps a short address. Some aspect of life at the Front. Of course we want to know the truth.’
The truth, did they? That was easy. David was not cheap. He said aloud, ‘Sorry. Been ill, you know. Really don’t feel fit for that sort of business. And look here, by the way, this story that’s going the rounds. About Grey. Couldn’t we do something—fizzle it out somehow? They’ve got you mixed up in it too, I understand.’
He did not look at her. Louie’s eyes melted into Lindsay’s. She drew a long breath, then spoke with a guarded frailness in her speech. A mere trickle of sound.
