The Shadow and the Peak

by Richard Mason

  “Silvia’s got it. She’s been telling everyone you gave it her.” After saying this much, she thought she might as well go on, and added, “She’s also been telling everyone that you write her notes. She says you leave them for her to collect in one of the bushes in the garden.”

  “What sort of notes?”

  Rosemary looked embarrassed.

  “I don’t know.”

  “But nobody believes her?”

  She professed not to know this either, but explained, “She let us watch her collect one yesterday. She took it out of the bush—but she tore it up after she’d read it, and wouldn’t let us see it. She said it was private.”

  “I’m not surprised,” Douglas said. “You certainly wouldn’t have found it was my writing.”

  The task of speaking to Silvia about this was going to be extremely distasteful, but he would have to face it. He went in search of her after tea. He found her sitting under one of the junipers, writing another story for him.

  He said to her point-blank:

  “Silvia, have you got my elephant?”

  She flushed and said nothing.

  He said, “If you must take something that doesn’t belong to you, why on earth don’t you keep quiet about it? You’re obviously going to be found out sooner or later if you go round telling people it was given you.”

  She stared at him dumbly. He went on:

  “You remember what I told you the other day about trying to make an impression on people? I can only think that’s why you did it. You see it doesn’t work, don’t you? You end up by making quite the wrong sort of impression. Perhaps you’ll understand what I mean now.” This also seemed to cover the notes in the bougainvillea, so he decided not to mention them. She was still speechless. He said, “Anyhow, you might let me have the elephant back some time. As you know, it’s of some sentimental value to me.”

  He left her and went down to his bungalow. Within half an hour Silvia appeared on the verandah. She had completely regained her composure.

  “Please, can I keep the elephant?” she said.

  “No,” he said. “You can’t.”

  She was silent.

  “What’s the matter?” he said. “You haven’t gone and broken it, have you?”

  “No. I just want to keep it.”

  “Well, you can’t. And in future don’t take things of mine without asking.”

  She was not at all upset by his crossness. It was extraordinary how she had pulled herself together in half an hour. She looked at him blandly.

  “I know you’ve heard about the notes as well.”

  “Yes, I have. I was extremely annoyed about it. You ought to have had more sense. It was obvious that the other children would find out that I hadn’t written them.”

  “You might have done,” she said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You might have written notes to me, if you hadn’t cared about what other people would think.”

  “I don’t understand you at all,” he said.

  “You care enough about me to have written them.”

  He said, “My dear girl—”

  “I’m not a girl,” Silvia said.

  “For heaven’s sake, what are you?”

  “I’m a woman.”

  “You’re on your way to becoming one,” he said. “But that’s rushing things a bit. Some people are glad to call themselves girls at thirty.”

  “I have feelings like a woman,” Silvia said.

  “I don’t think any sensible woman would have invented that business about the notes, or taken my elephant.”

  “I wanted to have something of yours.”

  “That seems most unnecessary.” He was feeling very uneasy about the way the conversation was going.

  “No, it isn’t,” Silvia said. “I’d like you to have something of mine, too. Did you find some flowers in here the other day?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “You knew I’d put them there, didn’t you?”

  “I’d not the slightest idea,” he said untruthfully.

  “You must have done. You knew what I felt.”

  “I was always under the impression that you hated me.”

  “I did, until after I’d smashed up your room. I’d always thought you really hated me. But then I knew you didn’t, because of the way you behaved. You weren’t even angry. Now I don’t hate you. I do the opposite.”

  He could see only two lines to take: either he laughed at her, or else he played a sympathetic, fatherly, you’ll-soon-get-over-it role. He didn’t much care for the idea of laughing—he remembered reading in an authoritative book that children could be badly damaged by having their feelings laughed at—so he took the second and said: “Feelings have a habit of swinging from one extreme to the other. But if you try not to take too much notice, they finally settle down somewhere about the middle.”

  “Mine won’t,” Silvia said. “They’ll last for ever.”

  “In that case, you’ll be a very unusual person. Most girls feel strongly about lots of different people before they’re twenty.”

  “I’m very advanced for my age,” Silvia said. “I think there might have been some mistake about when I was born. I might be fifteen now. I knew a girl who ran away from home and was married when she was fifteen.”

  He laughed and said, “The trouble with you, Silvia, is that your imagination’s far too vivid. Why not just accept the fact that you’re twelve? You’ll be fifteen soon enough.”

  “It isn’t imagination if you feel things.”

  “It can be,” he said.

  “I know what I feel. I know what you feel, too. You’ve always bothered about me much more than about the other girls.”

  “I’ve bothered about you more because you’ve been more of a nuisance,” he said. “That’s my job here.”

  “It’s all right,” she said tolerantly. “You don’t have to say anything about it. I don’t expect you to. I know it’s very difficult for you in your position. But I shan’t discuss it with anyone else—not now I’ve talked it over with you.”

  “You’d better go and explain to the others that it wasn’t true about the notes,” he said. “And get it out of your head that I think about you in a different way from the other girls.”

  “I don’t see why I should.”

  “Because I feel exactly the same about you all. Now run away—and don’t forget to give me back my elephant.”

  “I’ll go and bring it now,” she said.

  “I don’t want you to bring it now. Give it to me some time when I’m up at the Great House.”

  “All right,” she said. “You needn’t worry, anyhow. I’m not going to make things awkward for you.”

  “Try not to make things awkward for yourself, either,” he said.

  It was only after she had gone that he began to wonder whether Silvia had been putting on a very clever act, to justify the theft and the fabrication of the notes, and to make up for the humiliation of being found out. He would have preferred this, on the whole, to the disquieting alternative that she had been sincere. He really didn’t know what to make of it—and he preferred not to think of what stories she was telling the other children.

  He avoided seeing her alone for the rest of that week; but in his classes she wore the knowing and rather superior expression of one who shared a secret with the master. He took good care not to pay her special attention—nor to ignore her, for she might have interpreted that, for the benefit of the others, as an over-played attempt to reveal nothing in public. He supposed the whole situation was one that Pawley would have called unusually significant, meriting a putting together of heads; but he was reluctant to submit it to Pawley’s clumsy consideration from all angles, and so he didn’t consult him. Pawley was still extremely pleased about Silvia’s superficia
l behaviour, and Douglas half expected to be sent for at any moment and offered the headmastership, whilst Pawley self-effacingly reduced himself to the ranks.

  Chapter Thirteen

  On Wednesday Judy was away on a trip to Trinidad, and he spent only twenty minutes in Kingston, buying books and cigarettes, and then drove back to the hills. He went a walk along the top of the ridge and returned to the school in time for supper. As he was going into the dining-room, he met Mrs. Morgan.

  “Oh, Mr. Lockwood, I’ve really bad news for you.” Her cheeks sagged with distress. “Really bad.”

  The bad news was that John had jaundice. After Mrs. Morgan’s introductory lamentation, he had expected some much more appalling calamity, and he was quite relieved that it was nothing worse. However, John’s jaundice later turned out to be a greater calamity than it had seemed at first.

  He went up to the sick-room after supper. John’s dark skin was only slightly discoloured, but his eyeballs had turned the conventional yellow. He was looking extremely sorry for himself, which was not surprising in view of the naturally depressive effect of jaundice.

  “Cheer up,” Douglas said. “You’ll be over it in a few days.”

  John showed no signs of cheering up, and presently he turned his ochre eyes towards Douglas and said in a shrunk little voice:

  “It’s all right, you don’t have to pretend to me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know I’ve got leprosy.”

  Douglas laughed, although he had now recognized the dumb fear that lay in John’s eyes.

  “That’s nonsense. The doctor came up to see you this afternoon, didn’t he? He said you had jaundice. He was in no doubt at all.”

  “That’s what he wanted me to think.”

  “It’s what he told Mrs. Morgan.”

  John stared at him unbelievingly.

  “I’m going yellow. I know that’s what happens first when you have leprosy.”

  It appeared that a long time ago somebody had told him this. Of course it was quite untrue, but probably this notion, coupled with his fear of leprosy, had been the cause of the jaundice. He had been worrying himself to death and looking at himself fifty times a day to see if he was turning yellow, and in the end he had turned yellow, although for quite a different reason from the one he supposed. That was the odd sort of way the body behave—as if it had a mind of its own and liked playing practical jokes. Douglas tried to explain this to John. He said:

  “It’s just like telling someone you’re going to touch them with a red-hot poker, and then touching them with a cold one. They get a blister because they were quite convinced it was going to be hot. You’ve got jaundice because you were quite convinced you were going to turn yellow. But you certainly haven’t got leprosy. I give you my word we’re not deceiving you.”

  Before Douglas left the sick-room John had declared himself reassured, although the fear in his ochre eyes had not completely died out. His fear was not in itself a calamity, because he was bound to recover from the jaundice in time; but there were seeds of calamity in his mere presence in the sick-room.

  It was impossible to tell by what agency the news of John’s illness was first carried outside the school, but it must have travelled rapidly. They later heard that within twenty-four hours it had been talked about in Montego Bay. Montego Bay was one hundred and thirty miles from the school. In Kingston, which was less than thirty miles away, it had presumably become gossip very much sooner. The gossip was exactly what might have been expected. A few weeks ago it had been rumoured that John had leprosy. He was now ill. It therefore followed logically, to a civilization that had not reached a higher standard in Jamaica than elsewhere, that leprosy was the illness. The corollary of this rumour was equally inevitable. It ran to the effect that Blue Mountain School, being in the habit of accepting throw-outs from other schools and allowing them to mix with other children, was not going to draw the line at retaining a leper and allowing him to circulate freely.

  The first hint of these murmurings reached Pawley through his wife, who had been down to Kingston for a morning’s shopping. They threw him into a panic. He called Douglas down to his bungalow. They had only just begun to discuss what measures might be taken when the maid brought in the post. There were four letters from parents uttering protests in varying degrees of vehemence. Two of the parents threatened openly to take away their children if the source of infection was not removed from the school; the other two implied the same threat in more veiled terms. As Pawley read them through he could already envisage the complete collapse of the school and “Closed” hung on the gate between the eucalyptus trees.

  “It’s quite clear what we must do, Lockwood,” he said. One of the letters was still shaking in his hand. “We must send John away for the time being. Just until he’s better, of course.”

  “But it’s absurd!” Douglas said.

  Pawley goggled nervously through his glasses. “I quite agree with you. It seems quite unnecessary to us. But in this case we should be wise to set aside our personal feelings—”

  “What about John’s personal feelings?” Douglas said.

  “Quite, quite,” Pawley said quickly. Then he indicated the letters again. “But we must bear in mind the interest of the majority—even if it means temporarily overlooking the individual . . . It takes a lot of courage to do it, of course.”

  “The majority haven’t the faintest idea what their interest is.”

  “They think they have—which I’m afraid amounts to the same thing.”

  Douglas said indignantly, “Do you mean to say we’ve got to throw John out on his neck, just because people are they so damned stupid that they believe a wicked lie?”

  Pawley lifted his hands in a helpless gesture.

  “I only wish there was an alternative.”

  “There is an alternative. We can ask a Medical Officer of Health to endorse Dr. Knowles’s diagnosis of jaundice, and send a statement to the parents and the Press. After that, anybody who still believes that John has leprosy can be certified insane.”

  Pawley was not too pleased about this suggestion; he had made up his mind that the only way to placate the parents was to get rid of John, and he said rather uncomfortably:

  “We could do that, of course. But it all takes time. We might be wise to safeguard ourselves in the meantime.”

  “All right, we can send John away,” Douglas said. “But I’d like to know what people are going to think of us when they find out that John hasn’t got leprosy after all.”

  This argument impressed Pawley. He thought it over for a minute, and then agreed to let John stay. Douglas called the Public Health Office on the telephone for him, because he was still too harassed to do it himself. He arranged for a Medical Officer to come up the next day. He then left Pawley’s study, feeling confident that no fresh snags could arise in the meantime.

  He was wrong.

  In the middle of the afternoon he was again called down to Pawley’s bungalow. As he passed the garage, he saw a taxi standing near the gate. He guessed that it was either the Medical Officer visiting sooner than expected, or else one of the parents come to utter a protest in person. But it was neither. It was John’s mother.

  She was sitting in Pawley’s study, and had evidently been there for some time. Pawley invited Douglas to pull up a chair. He then said:

  “I know you’ll be sorry to hear this, Lockwood—but Mrs. Cooper feels it might be advisable for her to take John away from the school for the present. I’ve told her how much we shall regret losing him; but naturally I’ve no right to stand in her way.”

  “Why does she feel it advisable?” Douglas asked. He looked at Mrs. Cooper, hoping she would answer, but Pawley said quickly:

  “She’s naturally very upset about all the gossip. And she feels that while John’s ill she can give him much better care at home.�
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  “But he oughtn’t to be moved with a temperature like that,” Douglas said. “And certainly not down into the heat.”

  “Nevertheless,” Pawley said, “I think that perhaps under the circumstances Mrs. Cooper is taking the wisest course.”

  Douglas looked at Mrs. Cooper. “What does your husband feel about it?”

  “He hasn’t said much,” Mrs. Cooper said. She was wearing her best cotton dress, and sitting anxiously with her plump hands resting on her lap. “Everything’s just the same as when you came to see me.”

  “Does he want you to take John away?”

  “He hasn’t said so. I really only came up to visit John because he was ill. I didn’t know what a lot of trouble it was causing with the other parents. But now Mr. Pawley’s told me, it doesn’t seem fair to let him stay. I’d feel dreadful if the school had to suffer because of John.”

  Pawley looked embarrassed about this. He avoided Douglas’s eyes, and said with awkward pomposity:

  “It wasn’t my intention to make you feel like that, Mrs. Cooper. I understood you to say that you’d be happier looking after John at home—just while he has jaundice, of course.”

  “No, it isn’t that,” Mrs. Cooper said self-consciously. “It’s just that I don’t want to be the cause of any trouble. I’m so ashamed of what’s happened already.”

  “Nobody can blame you for that,” Douglas said. “And the Medical Officer’s visit tomorrow should put an end to all this nonsense.”

  It was clear from Mrs. Cooper’s expression that she hadn’t heard about the Medical Officer.

  “I was just going to mention that when you arrived,” Pawley said, getting more rattled.

  “It would be a pity to take John away before then,” Douglas said. “Perhaps Mrs. Cooper wouldn’t mind letting him stay until we hear what the Medical Officer’s going to say?”

  “Oh, no, I wouldn’t,” Mrs. Cooper said at once. “I’d much rather let him stay, if you really don’t mind.”

  “Very well, if that’s how you feel about it,” Pawley said, trying to look delighted. “I’m afraid I misunderstood you before.”