The Shadow and the Peak

by Richard Mason

  “Where did you go?”

  “All over the place,” she said vaguely. “I’ve been to Washington and New York.”

  “New York’s a fine city, isn’t it?” he said. “Where did you stay?”

  She shifted her arms uncomfortably. “Oh, I’ve masses of friends there. I can’t remember all the places I’ve stayed at.” She had moved her eyes away, but she turned them back towards him again and said, “I’ve stayed in people’s apartments.” She must have been told that you couldn’t look someone straight in the face if you were lying, and had trained herself to do it. He didn’t want her to know that he thought she was lying, it would give her another reason for hostility, so he turned away casually and said:

  “Well, you’re one up on me there. I’ve always wanted to visit the States. I haven’t got round to it yet.”

  “It’s glorious,” she said more easily. “That’s one of the reasons why they couldn’t stand me at my last school. I knew much more than all the others did.”

  “What were the other reasons?”

  “I used to do things that nobody else dared.”

  “What sort of things?”

  She put on the supercilious smile to show she wasn’t afraid of telling him.

  “I used to write letters to men, for one thing,” she said. “We weren’t allowed to, but I didn’t care.”

  “And what happened when you did what you weren’t allowed to?”

  “They punished me,” she said. “They used to shut me up in my room. It just made me laugh. I got out of the window if I felt like it. I sat in the bushes and smoked.” She evidently thought the boasting impressed him, and she went on, “I’ve brought some cigarettes here, if you want to know.”

  “You needn’t have bothered,” he said. “I’ve any amount.” He pushed a packet across the table. “Help yourself.”

  She stared at him uncertainly.

  “Don’t you mind me smoking?”

  “If you’ve smoked before, it evidently doesn’t bring you out in spots,” he said. “You can come down here and have one whenever you want.”

  She hesitated and then said, “I don’t want one now.” She was probably afraid of choking in front of him.

  He said, “They say it stops you growing if you smoke cigarettes when you’re young, but I doubt if it’s true. It would be rather interesting to see.”

  “You don’t seem to care what anyone does here,” she said. It sounded as if she was putting out a feeler.

  “We’ve got to draw the line somewhere. We can’t let you go round killing off the other girls, or their parents would have something to say. And we’re not particularly keen for you to burn down buildings or do anything destructive of that sort.”

  “I don’t see the point in a school where you can do practically anything,” she said.

  Douglas said, “As you’ve probably discovered, we’ve got funny ideas here, Silvia. At least, they’re funny to some people, though not to us. We believe that you can only work properly if you enjoy what you’re doing. You’ve probably got hold of the notion that schools exist for the purpose of making children unhappy. This school exists to try and make you happy, so that you can enjoy learning. And it’s not a bad idea to learn a few things before you go off and tackle life by yourself.”

  Silvia sat still with her arms crossed, looking supercilious and unimpressed. After a minute she said challengingly:

  “Aren’t you going to punish me?”

  “What for?”

  “For all the things people have told you about me.”

  “No, we’re not.”

  “I don’t care what you do to me, anyhow.”

  “In that case it certainly wouldn’t be any use punishing you,” he said. “It would be much more useful if we could find some way to make you happy. You know what I once read? ‘No happy man ever disturbed a meeting, or preached a war, or committed a murder.’ I have an idea that if you were really happy here, people would stop complaining about you.”

  “I’m perfectly happy,” Silvia said.

  “All right,” he said. “But if you ever decide you aren’t, I wish you’d come down and tell me about it.”

  Silvia stood up. There was still nothing in her expression that resembled friendship or trust.

  “Is that all you want me for?” she said.

  “Yes, you can go when you want.”

  She went off down the steps. He watched her turn up the path, feeling absurdly hurt by her sudden departure, and angry with himself for handling the business so badly. All that pep talk about happiness. You didn’t make people happy by telling them it was what they ought to be. You didn’t gain their confidence by shoving cigarettes at them, either. It was all so easy in theory; you were nice to a child, and the child responded by being nice in return. It stopped being naughty, and everyone lived happily ever after. Rubbish! What happened was that the child despised you for being weak and a fool, took advantage of you and behaved far worse than before. All the same, what else could he have done? The catalogue of punishments and the policeman’s baton weren’t any solution. They might have kept peace for the pedagogues, but they wouldn’t have helped Silvia. The pedagogues were for Silvia, not Silvia for the pedagogues. Perhaps he was just being too impatient. He’d told Pawley you couldn’t expect immediate results. You couldn’t.

  He saw Silvia coming back. He felt hopeful for a moment; then he saw that her manner had in no way softened. She stopped at the foot of the steps.

  “It’s perfectly true that I’ve been to America,” she said.

  He laughed. “Why shouldn’t it be?”

  “My father will tell you that I haven’t, but I have.”

  “How did you manage it without letting him know?”

  “I expect they told you that I ran away from my last school for a week, didn’t they?”

  “They didn’t mention it.”

  “They probably daren’t admit it. But I did. I never told them where I’d been.”

  “And you’d been to America?”

  “Yes.” She seemed to be looking at him properly now. “One of my American friends had a private aeroplane. He came and picked me up. We flew to New York. Then he flew me back again. We landed in a special field at night. Do you believe me?”

  “Why not?”

  “It’s quite true. I thought I’d tell you, in case you spoke to my father and thought I was a liar.”

  “I’m glad you did,” he said.

  She watched him for a moment, then turned and walked away again. It was curious with what conviction she’d told that little story, as if she believed it herself. Perhaps she did believe it. An adolescent mind was rich in phantasy, and the line it drew between daydreams and reality was often indistinct.

  He thought over the nature of Silvia’s phantasy, the great feat performed for her in the spirit of pure love; and then he remembered a boyhood phantasy of his own, in which he had seen himself at some point in the future, loved purely by a beautiful woman whom he had rescued from a sinking ship, and then he thought of Caroline and the unsatisfactory messy way that love had turned out. If only you could live in phantasy always! But only lunatics could do that, while poor sane creatures had to accept the shoddy substitute of reality. Perhaps training children to accept the shoddy substitute was roughly what you might call a good education.

  He sat for another few minutes, and then got up and went inside the bungalow. The wooden elephant stood on the bedside table with its trunk pointing towards the door. Ivy had moved it again while she was dusting.

  He went over and turned it, with an automatic movement, to face the window.

  *

  He hadn’t told Ivy about the peculiar properties of the elephant because one of two things would have happened. Either she would have gone off into a record-breaking bout of giggles, or else she would hav
e been so overawed, on account of her superstitious peasant nature, that she would have refused to enter his bungalow again. There was also another reason why he didn’t tell her—in fact, why he didn’t tell anyone. It might sound as if he took it seriously.

  The elephant was about three inches long. It had been given him in India during the war, in return for alms, by a fakir with long black matted hair and a facility for sticking six-inch nails into his flesh without apparent material damage. The fakir had probably known more about Occidentals and what they expected of him than he had known about the Infinite. He had explained that to bring good fortune the trunk of the elephant should be pointed towards a window. Pointed towards a door, it would bring the reverse—or at any rate it would lose its power to avert evil. There had been an imminence of danger in Douglas’s life at the time; and danger made you superstitious. He had kept the elephant as an insurance, in the same way that the agnostic said his prayers: “Oh, please, God—if there is a God . . .” During the following month he had been in a dilemma: he had been living mainly in tents, where the window and the door were a single aperture. He had not known where to point the trunk. But his difficulty must have been appreciated, for he had been rewarded with an uninterrupted succession of lucky breaks, and the protection of his life beyond reasonable expectation. After the war the power of the elephant had noticeably declined—but this only went to prove that the supernatural was not immune from war-weariness. He had benefited from its dispensations for so long that he would have been an ingrate to abandon it. He had hung on to it and pointed it to the window all through that awful business with Caroline, and finally packed it in his suit-case and brought it to Jamaica. In his bungalow he corrected its position daily after the dis­arrangement of Ivy’s dusting, with the same confirmed habit that he dried his razor after use.

  Now, as he twisted it through the all-important ninety degrees, a trivial but amusing thought occurred to him. It was probably nothing to do with the elephant that the thought occurred at that moment, although afterwards he sometimes liked to wonder. He had still had in mind the­ boyhood phantasy in which he rescued a girl from a sinking ship; and the thought was simply that he had never come nearer to the boyhood phantasy than yesterday when he had rescued the girl from the crashed aircraft.

  He told himself that he found this amusing because it would have been too absurd to admit that he found it significant. He stood there for a minute, amusing himself by supposing that he lived out the rest of the phantasy and fell in love with her, and that she fell in love with him, and that their love was the pure love of dreams and not the messy thing that in reality it always turned out to be. He had a vivid pictorial imagination, and almost at once a string of pictures presented itself to his mind, representing the smooth evolution of their idyllic affair, and culminating in a scene in which he was lying by her side on the sand of a Caribbean beach. Behind them, amongst the palms, was the bungalow where they were living, and on the verandah of the bungalow (his mind tracked up to it like a motion-camera) was a table on which stood a bowl of ice cubes and two Old-fashioned Cocktails, looking rather like a coloured advertisement in an American magazine. And here he laughed to himself to show how much this banal similarity amused him, and turned away from the elephant and looked at his watch. It was after five. He ought to be up helping the children with their hobbies.

  The hobbies were voluntary, and most of the children preferred playing about in the grounds. There was a ball­ game in progress amongst the junipers as he climbed the hill. He declined an invitation to join in and went up to the modelling shed. It was empty—not even Rosemary. In that case he would go and see the patients. He turned into the garden. As he entered the Great House he met Duffield coming out. Duffield said testily:

  “That sort of thing wouldn’t happen if I was running the place.”

  “What sort of thing?” Duffield had an irritating habit of making a statement about something that had just happened to him as if you already knew all about it.

  “I’ve just caught Alan relieving himself out of a window. Said he couldn’t be bothered to go upstairs.”

  “It was thoughtful of him to go to the window,” Douglas said.

  “I shouldn’t wonder if some of the girls didn’t see him from the garden, either. And there’s not a blighted thing I can do about it.”

  “There isn’t much.”

  “I’d go to Pawley—but you know the kind of tommy-rot he’d start talking, don’t you?”

  “He’d probably put it down to natural high spirits,” Douglas said; if he wasn’t too worried about what parents would think.”

  “Likely as not he’d tell Alan to relieve himself out of the window every day for a week until he got tired of it.” He jerked his head incredulously. “If I had my own way, he’d get tired of it sooner than that. He’d get tired of it in the time it took me to whack him. When Pawley’s had as much experience of boys as I have, he’ll want less high spirits and more sore bottoms.” This thought seemed to humour him a bit, and he added more lightly, “It’s a good thing I didn’t take my day off, anyhow. I might have got back to find the whole school lined up watering the flowers.” He managed a dry smile. “Well, see you at supper.” He went off.

  Douglas went upstairs. There was only one sick-room in the school; there were no children there at present, and it had been used for the girl. The man who had lost his wife and daughter had been put in one of the boys’ dormitories, and the boys moved out.

  Douglas went to the dormitory and knocked lightly on the door. There was no reply, so he looked in. The man was asleep. He closed the door again with guilty relief: he had dreaded the duty of commiseration. He went down the corridor to the sick-room. He had not dreaded this visit, but as he approached the door an unexpected reluctance came over him. He had almost forgotten the girl’s appearance—it had been displaced in his imagination by the girl who went with the Jamaican beach and the Old-fashioned Cocktail—and to see her now must bind his thoughts to reality and forbid the amusement of the dream. Nevertheless, he knocked on the door.

  The girl was standing by the window.

  “Oh!” she said. “I thought it was Mrs. Morgan.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “I’m not,” she said. “I mean, not that I don’t like her—but she’d have been absolutely wild at catching me out of bed.”

  She was wearing a nightgown that was far too large for her. It must have been one of Mrs. Morgan’s. Its surplus folds were wrapped round her waist and tied with a pyjama cord. Her hair was fair and hung loosely on to her shoulders. She had a slightly tilted nose and a quick, friendly smile. The sort of smile that dispensed with all the formalities of introduction.

  “I can sympathize with Mrs. Morgan,” he said. “I can see she’s been having difficulty with you.”

  “But there’s absolutely nothing the matter with me.”

  “Except that you were concussed.”

  “Oh, rubbish,” she said. “I only had two stitches. Isn’t it unbelievable, after what happened? The scar’s not even going to show. Look, you can see if you like. Are you interested in that sort of thing?” She spun round without waiting for him to answer, and parted her hair with her hands. Then she turned back and said, “Aren’t you the person who rescued me?”

  “I gave a hand.”

  “I wish I knew what to say. I’m rotten at thanking people. I ought to give you a box of cigars, or a gold cigarette-case or something. Would you like a gold cigarette-case?”

  “No,” he said. “But I’d like you to get into bed.”

  “You sound like a schoolmaster,” she said. “Is that what you are? Anyhow, I don’t mind being in bed if I have someone to talk to. You’re not rushing off again, are you?”

  She jumped into bed with an eagerness and energy that were astonishing for someone who had just been knocked out in a crash. She had the young energy of a child,
yet she was not a child, and she had the freshness of a virgin, yet she probably wasn’t that either. He noticed that her fingernails had been painted, and the paint was wearing off unevenly. She saw him looking, and said:

  “I know, isn’t it hideous? I’ve nothing to take it off with—and no more to put on. I suppose it’s no use asking anyone here?”

  “Only Mrs. Pawley—the headmaster’s wife.”

  “Does she paint her nails?”

  “Cyclamen.”

  “Oh, that would just do.” She forgot about the nails and said, “I can just remember coming up on the stretcher. Wasn’t I gabbling a lot of rubbish?”

  “Yes, you were.”

  “I thought I was. What did I say?”

  “That you tried to commit suicide in Mexico.” He smiled. He knew it was rubbish now. She wasn’t the sort of girl who committed suicide.

  “Oh, that was perfectly true,” she said with the quick, frank smile.

  “I can’t believe it.”

  “Yes, I did!” She was indignant at being doubted. “I took thirty-five sleeping tablets.”

  “That should have done the job all right.”

  “It should, shouldn’t it? I cut my wrist at the same time, as a matter of fact, but I fainted before I’d cut the vein. Do you want to see?”

  She held out her arm. There was a thin scar an inch long on the inside of the wrist. Across it were the marks of three stitches.

  “Isn’t it wonderful the way they can darn you up? I once knew someone who had seventeen stitches after an operation.”

  “You’ll soon have more than that, if you go on in this way,” he said. “What did you do it for? Were you broke?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “At least, that wasn’t the reason. It was the other obvious one.”

  “A man?”

  “Yes; wasn’t it silly of me?”

  “What happened to him?” Douglas said. “Did he know about it?”

  “Good Lord, no,” she said. Her eyes looked quite untroubled and amused. They were green eyes, and their loveliness disturbed him. “He’d already gone back to his wife.”