by Nan Shepherd
‘It’s Mr Garry up there,’ said his quicker-eyed wife. ‘He has ways real like his aunt. I’ve seen her rumble out the laughin’ an naebody by. Well, a laugh’s a thing for twa or for twenty, says I, nae for a man an’ him himsel’.’ Even her sharp eyes had not made out Mrs Falconer’s sombre figure against the trees.
Garry stopped laughing and said to Mrs Falconer, ‘It’s such an obvious thing to say, isn’t it? That’s why it is so confoundedly clever of you to say it. Inspired, I ought to say. Clever is a stupid word. Yes, that is the brutal fact: they too are men. As much a part of things as I am. One knows it at the Front, but here—I’m angriest of all, you know, because I mocked at Francie. And yet I suppose I couldn’t have mocked at myself without mocking at him too; and it was only when I had laughed at myself, last night, with these men, that I began to feel I was a part of things here.’ He interrupted himself to say, ‘But all this is boring you. And listen—this Louie business: of course I wanted David cleared. But when I found about the ring—well, any man would have shut up. I felt pretty beastly, I can tell you, when I saw them all agape. Anyhow, it was John Grey’s business after that, not mine. I had told her, you see, that I would take no action. But you—I don’t want you to—’
‘I acted on an impulse,’ she said, smiling bravely. ‘It was cruel of me. I had just come to know. If I had thought about it longer, I’d have seen it was no business of mine.’
‘Please don’t blame yourself. Perhaps it’s best—’
‘Well, I’m glad I met you to apologise,’ said Mrs Falconer calmly. ‘I’ll say goodbye just now.’
Garry went homeward thinking still of her reply: ‘They too are men.’ It seemed to him the wisest saying he had heard. He looked again at the wide leagues of land. And a curious thing happened. He saw everything he looked at not as substance, but as energy. All was life. Life pulsed in the clods of earth that the ploughshares were breaking, in the shares, the men. Substance, no matter what its form, was rare and fine.
The moment of perception passed. He had learned all that in college. But only now it had become real. Every substance had its own secret nature, exquisite, mysterious. Twice already this country sweeping out before him had ceased to be the agglomeration of woods, fields, roads, farms; mysterious as a star at dusk, with the same ease and thoroughness, had become visible as an entity: once when he had seen it taking form from the dark, solid, crass, mere bulk; once irradiated by the light until its substance all but vanished. Now, in the cold April dawn, he saw it neither crass nor rare, but both in one.
He looked again at this astonishing earth. And suddenly for the second time he laughed aloud. Mrs Falconer, gone not so far but that she heard him, stopped upon the road. She could not understand why he laughed, and she felt chill and sad.
‘Both crass and fine,’ he was thinking; but he was thinking no longer of the land, but of the men. Not irradiated by an alien light, but in themselves, through all the roughness of their make what strange and lovely glimpses one could have of their secret nature! ‘Each obeying his law,’ he thought.
Around him he noted that the woods were flaming. A fine flame was playing over the leafless branches, not gaudy like the fires of autumn, but strong and pure. The trees, not now by accident of light but in themselves, were again etherealised. For a brief space, in spring, before the leaf comes, the life in trees is like a pure and subtle fire in buds and boughs. Willows are like yellow rods of fire, blood-red burns in the sycamore and scales off in floating flakes as the bud unfolds and the sheath is loosened. Beeches and elms, all dull beneath, have webs of golden and purple brown upon their spreading tops. Purple blazes in the birch twigs and smoulders darkly in the blossom of the ash. At no other season are the trees so little earthly. Mere vegetable matter they are not. One understands the dryad myth, both the emergence of the vivid delicate creature and her melting again in her tree; for in a week, a day, the foliage thickens, she is a tree again.
For the first time Garry was in the country at the moment when this very principle of life declared itself in the boughs. ‘As fine as that,’ he thought, ‘from coarse plain earth.’ But if one surprised them at their moment, men had the same bright fire.
Mrs Falconer walked home.
Theresa asked, ‘Where have you been stravaigin’ to at this time of the morning? To get the air! Well, the work stands first, I always say. There’s all the windows to clean after that gale. We can’t see a thing for dirt.’
Lindsay was coming in from the garden. The grass was quite covered with twigs and torn leaves, with cypress berries, with pine needles and cones. And under one tree, an arm of which had been riven from the trunk, Lindsay had found a nest with an egg and three naked mangled nestlings tumbled on the ground. But saddest of all was the death of the bird she was holding against her body.
‘Look, quite dead. I found it lying there. Oh, Paradise, could it be the mother of those gorbals? How pitiful—’
‘No, no.’ Paradise was touching the soft cold form with her misshapen fingers. ‘This one was flying. See, his neck is broken. He had been driven by the wind against a bough. They’re frail things, birdies. Many a one the gales bring down.’
‘Oh! But can’t they fly clear? Can’t they see where they are going?’
Paradise shook her head. ‘What’s a fluff of air and feather against a hurricane? I’ve seen them rattle down in dozens.’
Lindsay held the dead bird against her breast, smoothing the silken wings and bosom. ‘See, see.’ She lifted a wing with gentle fingers and displayed a patch of warm bright russet in the hidden hollow.
‘Such small, small feathers. Oh, its loveliest part is hid away.’
Mrs Falconer stood apart and watched. She had not offered to show the bird to Cousin Ellen.
‘She loves the bird more than me,’ thought the woman sadly. And she winced again at the remembrance of Lindsay’s scornful words after the exposure of the theft. But as though she had divined a secret chagrin, the girl came softly to her side, holding the bird.
‘See, Cousin Ellen.’ She displayed the russet pool beneath the wing; and thinking that Ellen was sad because of Theresa’s reprimand, she whispered, ‘I’m cleaning windows, too—oh yes, I want to help.’
It was afternoon before she went to Knapperley. Garry was on the roof.
‘Come down, come down. Have you been there all day?’
He nodded, nails in his mouth, and continued to hammer.
Shortly he came down.
‘Well, I’ve discovered a thing I never knew—how slates are put on.’
‘Oh, you’ve slated it. Where’s your iron sheet today?’
‘Dangling by one tooth this morning. So I gathered what was left of the slates. No, I haven’t slated it. Or only a bit. I’ll have to get more slates. But I’ve fixed all that were usable. Come up the ladder and I’ll show you. They go on like this—each one overlapping other two.’
‘Yes. But stop for a little now, Garry.’
He came down, but almost at once began to clear away the drifts of rubbish that the wind had left.
‘Will you be always like this when we are married, Garry? Always at work?’
‘Expect so. There’s so much to do. I’ll tell you what, Linny, the war seems a colossal bit of work to get finished, but ordinary life’s going to be a bigger. Coming back here, and finding all the queer individual things people do and think—it’s frightened me. To get them all fitted in—I don’t see how it can be done.’
The faces came on him in a mob-Francie, Jonathan, Jake, the tramp and the half-wit, Louie, Miss Theresa Craigmyle, Miss Barbara: the substance from which all his fine new kingdoms must be built. He would have liked to repudiate the knowledge he had just gained of human nature: how could one proclaim an ideal future when men and women persisted in being so stubbornly themselves?—And at that moment Miss Barbara rumbled round the corner of the house with a wheelbarrow.
‘Build a house,’ she said with scorn, as she set down the bar
row, which was piled with earthy boulders. ‘Build a house, mend a house, that’s what your common bodies do. O ay, you’re Donnie Forbes’s grandson right enough. A Paterson of Knapperley never turned their hand to building houses.’
‘And what are the stones for, aunt?’
‘I’m putting up a cairn.’ She stooped to the barrow handles and continued on her way.
‘To commemorate the war?’ shouted Garry.
‘Deil a war. The fire, my lad, the fire.’
FIFTEEN
Whom the Gods Destroy
For Mrs Falconer, she watched Lindsay, all quick excitement, gather her possessions from the windowed bedroom and drive away, rosy and laughing, by her father’s side. Then she climbed the stair and sat down in her empty room. She had never felt so desolate. The past came freely to her memory, and she recalled her dismal marriage, its ending, her humiliation at Theresa’s hands on her return. But none of these things had troubled her as she was troubled now. For many weeks she battled against a sense of guilt. But what had she done wrong? Even if she had erred in her public denunciation of the sinner, she had acted in good faith, had meant well. The shame that overwhelmed her was too deep and terrible to have sprung from that. The weeks passed, Lindsay was married, and very slowly Mrs Falconer began to understand. Lindsay’s words rang often in her ears—‘a horrid old woman, thrusting herself into the limelight’—and at first they made her indignant (‘to think that of me, to think that of me’), but after a time she saw that they were true. She had accused Louie so that Garry might be pleased with her.
During these months Mrs Falconer had grown pinched and wan. She sat much alone, with hands interlocked, eyes staring. When spoken to she started and spoke at random. Lang Leeb’s appreciation of these phenomena was delicate. Fine barbs went quivering into Ellen’s mind. A woman of sixty, pining for a man not half her age, was a spectacle to earn the gratitude of gods and men: so seldom do we let ourselves be frankly ludicrous.
In August Ellen acknowledged to herself that her love for Garry was an egotism. Her sense of shame and guilt grew heavier, not because she had discovered its cause, but because of the revelation she had had of the human heart, its waywardness and its duplicity. She had known quite well what her mother and sister had thought of her infatuation, and had despised them for the vileness of their thoughts. Now for the first time she herself felt evil. ‘It was only myself I thought of all the time.’ Her sense of escape, of flight into a larger world, was illusion.
She ceased to pray. Prayer, too, was an illusion. ‘Your God of Comforts’—she understood it now. Her God had always been a God of Comforts from whose bounty, as she fashioned her petitions, she had taken precisely what she wanted. One could go through a long life like that, thrilled and glowing as one rose from prayer, and all the while be bounded horribly within oneself. The God who had constrained her in her flaming ecstasy of devotion, whose direct commands she had obeyed in denouncing Louie, was created from her imagination: a figment of her own desire.
She continued throughout that winter to go to church, because it did not occur to her to cease the practice; but the services were torture. She looked in horror at the people as they prayed. ‘How do they know that there is anything there? Any God at all? I can never trust again what I feel within myself.’
One day in April as she walked alone, a bird flew low, alighted near her, pecked and tugged among the withered grasses, flew up in swift alarm, lit again. She watched, then sharply as though the words were spoken, she heard Lindsay’s eager question, ‘What is his name? But don’t you love birds, Cousin Ellen?’
Yes, yes, I have always loved them, she thought—their grace, their far swift flight, the cadence of their song—as I have loved all beauty, that is a part of my undying self, possessed eternally, the kingdom within my soul. Yet because she could not name the bird that flew up and hopped in front of her, a miserable sense of failure came across her spirit. She went home and found her sister Annie.
‘I saw a bird just now,’ she began, then choked. She had not spoken all that year to anyone about the things that filled her heart.
‘There’s lots of them about,’ said Miss Annie.
‘Yes. It flew away and came back again. I wonder what it would have been.’
‘What kind of bird?’
But Ellen could not answer. She knew neither its colour, nor shape, nor the length of wing or beak. She rose abruptly and went upstairs. The sense of shame and failure came over her with renewed intensity. It was absurd—because she did not know a bird’s name; but as she sat miserably by her window she saw all at once that it was not only the bird’s name of which she was ignorant: it was the whole world outside herself.
She had never felt so much abased, so lonely in the multitude of living things. It was spring, they were around her in myriads; but she did not know them. They had their own nature. Even the number of spots upon an egg, the sheen on wing or tail, was part of their identity. And that, she saw, was holy. They were themselves. She could not enter into their life save by respecting their real nature. Not to know was to despise them.
And so with men. One could not be taken into other lives except by learning what they were in themselves. Ellen had never cared to know. In her imaginings other people had been what she decreed, their real selves she ignored. ‘I have despised them all.’ She felt miserably small, imprisoned wholly in herself.
From that day her new life began; slowly, for she had consumed herself in shame, and at first had neither strength nor faith enough to live on new terms. Moreover, she was sixty one, and, from the monotony with which life in the Weatherhouse had passed, set in her habits. For a time she entertained wild projects: she would go away, work in a slum, learn life. But she had no money. The war was over, Kate was again in a paid situation. One day she drew Kate aside, mumbling.
‘I can’t make out what you’re saying, mother.’
‘If you could let me have some pocket money, dear. You know I’ve none at all.’
‘But you never want for anything, mother, I hope?’
‘No, no. It was only—just to have it, dear. But it doesn’t matter.’
‘Of course you shall have money, mother. I should have thought of it before.’
Kate gave her a few shillings.
One day she went to town. Excited, but calm through the magnitude of her purpose, she made her way to the Labour Exchange, and stood, fumbling among words, at the advisory bureau.
‘No, that is not what I wanted. No, no.’
The woman who watched her with shrewd and kindly eyes guessed at a tragedy: a gentlewoman fallen on evil days. But when she understood what the worn, haggard old woman wanted, she was silent through astonishment.
‘I thought there were so many openings for welfare workers,’ stammered Mrs Falconer.
‘But you have no training—and your age—but perhaps you must, you have nothing to live on.’
‘No, it’s not that—I just wanted to get away from home.’
‘Oh! Then if you don’t need the money, there is voluntary work that you could do.’
Mrs Falconer went bitterly home. Another fine fancy was smoke. She had pictured herself a successful social worker. ‘And I wanted to get away from home because I couldn’t bear to hear their remarks—to see me humiliated, that’s what it is. Confessing that my life’s been all amiss till now.’
These essays in sincerity hurt her. ‘But it’s only through sincerity that I can reach anywhere beyond myself.’ She must be sincere even with the birds and the wild flowers she had begun to study, to know their real selves that she might enter their life. Kate’s shillings had bought her certain textbooks, but her study halted. Birds moved so swiftly, she forgot so soon, her manuals were poor, and by her untaught efforts it was hard to identify these moving flakes of life and the bright, multitudinous flowers. Identify—discover their identity. She had never valued accurate information, holding that only the spirit signified, externals were an accident; y
et when she found that by noting external details she could identify a passing bird or a growing plant, a thrill of joy passed through her heart. She was no longer captive within her single self.
These moments of bliss came rarely in a long, slow time.
That summer she ceased to go to church. God—was there a God? And where could one discover His identity? She had believed all her life in this comfortable God who revealed Himself to her spirit in ecstasy and beauty; but her ecstasies had been a blind self-indulgence. No sincerity in that. ‘I can’t find God in the forms of a religion that has let me go so terribly astray, that has shut me away from everything but myself.’
Her sisters were aghast when she would not return to church. Annie’s was a genuine distress. ‘Ah, but you should go to church, you should go. We should all go to church as long’s we’re able.’ Miss Annie herself, crippled and serene, set out each Sunday morning alone, an hour before the time of service, to make her slow, laborious journey.
‘You might at least keep it up for appearance sake,’ Theresa hectored. ‘We’ve been a kirk-going family all our days. There’s no need to be kirk-greedy to do the respectable thing. A pretty story they’ll make of it, a Craigmyle and left the kirk.’
Some time after her rupture with the church, Mrs Falconer met the young Stella walking in dignified aloofness on the moor. Stella was in disgrace. Convicted of petty thieving, she had received a reprimand in face of the assembled Sunday School.
‘Oh, Stella,’ began Mrs Falconer, shocked at the bravado with which the girl flung out her story.
‘Oh, yes,’ interrupted Stella coolly. ‘Tell me, like all the rest of them, that God is watching all I do. I don’t believe it. There’s not a God, He’s just a make-up. So there!’
Mrs Falconer was silent. Stella, who had anticipated good game in the way of shocked remonstrance, inquired impatiently, ‘Well, aren’t you going to preach a bit to me about it?’
