Second Sight

by Neil M. Gunn

  “Why surprised? Wasn’t she prepared to take money under false pretences?”

  “I wasn’t, then,” said Helen. “I gave you an explanation which you could not refute. And you wangled yourselves out of it.”

  “Really?” said Geoffrey.

  “Yes, really,” said Helen.

  “I thought you admitted having overheard some remarks, by your local friends, who were privy to what happened?”

  “I know what you thought,” said Helen, “but you were wrong.”

  “Helen, child!” said her mother.

  “Well, they are trying to make out that I was betting on a certainty.”

  “And weren’t you?” asked Geoffrey.

  “Yes,” said Helen.

  Loud laughter.

  “Only,” said Helen, “it was not that certainty.”

  The room grew quiet. Joyce scratched her head. “I’m bogged.”

  “Hush!” said George. “Dramatic pause.”

  “I think it’s time,” said Lady Marway sensibly, “that we were all in bed. Especially you, Geoffrey.” She got up.

  Geoffrey heaved himself to his feet, staggered, and gripped his side. “Phew, a stitch!” he exclaimed, and sat down. “Nothing at all. No. Please.” After a little time, he got to his feet again. “That’s better. Thanks,” he said to George who picked up his staff. He wiped his forehead.

  “Let us give you a hand,” offered George.

  “Rubbish. Sitting too long in the one position. Or perhaps”, he said, turning his face to Helen, “I was pierced by a premonition of a forthcoming reference to second sight.” His laugh was heard as a bark and he made for the door.

  Harry found it difficult to get to sleep. The secret excitement that nothing could intrude upon, that nothing could damp, was still within him, and not only in his mind but running through his blood, in his hands, in his restless legs. I’ll never get to sleep! he thought. And though he did fall asleep, he awoke with the same feeling of alertness, and when he was at last shaved and dressed, he stood quite still on the floor of his room, more uncomfortably in the grip of his excitement than ever.

  Joyce’s voice floated up from below.

  He took a deep breath, gripped the stair rail, and, knowing he was behaving with madness, began tiptoeing towards Helen’s door.

  He arrived, choked with excitement, caught the knob. It made a noise, but his rigid grasp kept turning it. He pushed the door open and stepped into her room.

  Helen was sitting up in bed, all eyes. He tried to smile as he approached her. It was a ghastly effort and for a moment he could not speak. Then he whispered, “Will you come to-day?”

  He saw her breast heave. She nodded. At once he turned and left the room, drawing the door nearly shut, not closing it, went along the corridor, and ran down the stairs.

  Out on the path to the Corr beat, this little incident afforded them considerable amusement.

  “What really did you think when you saw me come in?”

  “I was beyond thinking.”

  They both laughed as they strode side by side at some little distance behind Alick and Donald and the pony.

  “I was frightfully nervous,” said Harry. “I’m sure I must have looked an awful ass. I really didn’t know what to do. It was on my mind—Joyce having asked you—and I never said a word. It occurred to me once or twice during the night. I wondered—what you thought.”

  “I—I really never thought,” said Helen. Then her eyes sparkled. “I’m sorry your conscience was troubled.”

  “It wasn’t my conscience,” said Harry.

  “No?”

  “No.”

  They laughed.

  “Isn’t it a divine morning?” cried Helen. “Feel the touch of frost? And the mists, clearing off the tops, look! Do you think there’s any place in the world so marvellous on a morning like this?”

  “The colours.”

  “I know,” Helen nodded. “The blues and purples and high-up greens in a suave wash—for miles. A colour photograph would look like a sentimental fake. Have you noticed that?”

  “Yes. Like those postcards, the large coloured views, bought in bookshops in little Highland towns. They look fantastically unreal.”

  “And they’re not. Extraordinary. Except, of course, that they don’t give you the sense of breadth and strength. This—this exhilaration,” said Helen.

  “Do you feel it tingling through you?”

  “Yes. Do you?”

  “Yes.”

  They laughed.

  “Look at that,” said Harry, as the mists curled away from the throat of Benbeg. “Does look like lace round a throat, doesn’t it? Sort of night-dress effect.”

  “I think that’s a trifle far-fetched.”

  “Is it?”

  There was silence for a moment; then their eyes met and glanced away.

  “You looked pretty well really,” said Harry.

  “Did I? When?”

  “This morning.”

  “Oh. I say, look at the perspective opening up off there. Into infinity. Withdrawing the curtain—to reveal what?”

  Harry did not speak.

  “I think autumn is the best time, the most lovely time,” Helen prattled on. “It should be spring. But there is something in autumn on a morning like this. A spirit moving somewhere. No, not moving; waiting and listening and—near. Do you feel something like that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jumps right on the heart—quick!—like that. And you could do anything; sing or—or cry. Have you felt it like that ever?”

  “You’re enchanting me again.”

  Helen kept her eyes in front. “Harry, don’t spoil it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Please—please don’t spoil it.” There was a pleading, passionate note in her voice.

  “I’m sorry, Helen.”

  “Don’t be sorry—like that.”

  “All right, Helen, forgive me. I merely have an urge to spoil it. I can’t help it.”

  “Don’t think me unreasonable.”

  “I can’t think of you at all. I wish I could. I’ll be more reliable if we’re talking of something else.”

  “And that spoils it too.”

  “Does it?”

  Their eyes met and they all but laughed.

  “What did you think of last night?” Helen asked. “I mean about the bet. Did you think I was quibbling badly?”

  “No. You were merely making a game of it. It was Geoffrey who tore it.”

  “I wasn’t quibbling really. Did you wonder afterwards what I meant by saying it was not that certainty?”

  “To confess the truth, I didn’t. I thought about something else.”

  “Did you?” She looked round at him.

  “Afraid I did.” He smiled enigmatically.

  “Oh,” she said, and looked ahead. “I thought you might have wondered. What I meant was that Alick did not work out the factors quite in the way I suggested first. He saw the thing happening.”

  “You mean—he had second sight of it?”

  “No. Something between. I can’t express the state. A certainty so strong that it becomes visualised. I can only vaguely grasp it myself. But—oh it’s no good trying to make sense.”

  “That’s extremely interesting,” said Harry. “I vaguely follow. Perhaps there are degrees in seeing. Although, wait! Can there really be degrees in seeing? Surely you must either see or you don’t?”

  “You can imagine you see?”

  “Wait, again! You mean there may be different ways of arriving at seeing? That is, you can have an involuntary vision—the real second sight—like Alick’s; or Alick might have sat there beside Angus, after he had put him to sleep, and by sheer concentration, in a half-dream state, have seen Geoffrey walking?”

  “Yes,” said Helen eagerly. “Something like that. Isn’t it remarkable how one’s mind develops an understanding of that sort of thing? You get a kind of light. And Harry, look!—look at the light on the water in t
he burn!… Do you know, sometimes I can sit by a burn like that and feel it pour past me and through me. I cannot describe the sensation of intimacy. There is a free fresh loveliness in it, a delight, full of light. And sometimes a cunning delight, full of fun. The bubbles sailing past, and the water, the clear or deep-brown warm and cool water, like velvet. See the bubbles, the little bright bubbles, being kicked up by the heels of something passing over that stone? See how they sparkle? Darlings, aren’t they?”

  “Of course, Helen, you’ll have to be careful that you don’t——”

  Helen laughed outright. “Because I called the bubbles darlings!” Her mirth was delicious. She was so sane, so elusive, oh sweet heaven so attractive! Harry’s heart turned over in him.

  “Helen—don’t spoil it.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Don’t say you’re sorry—like that.”

  “Harry,” said Helen, “I doubt if there’s one dancing bubble such a darling as yourself. However, that’s by the way. What——”

  “I have an awful feeling in me that you’ll pay for this—and pay dearly.”

  “I’ve stopped betting.”

  “Humff!”

  “Humff.”

  Suppressed noises came from her throat.

  Harry looked grim.

  “Oh Harry,” said Helen, “isn’t it just heaven to be alive?”

  “You seem to forget hell.”

  “How divine of you to come for me! And you looked—such a frightened, awkward boy.”

  “I put the heart across you, anyway.”

  “Faith and you did.” Nothing could subdue her mirth. “So please don’t do it again.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  “Not without warning, anyway.”

  He stopped and regarded her back, as she moved on humming an air. She stopped, turned, and raised her eyebrows. “Anything wrong?”

  As he came on, she kept time to his deliberate steps: “Grumf! grumf! grumf! grumf!”

  But what he was going to say or do was obliterated by a roar that came rumbling out of the hill-side. It was the forest roar of a lion, a deep-throated fearsome sound. Helen stood looking up at Benbeg. She knew what it was. It was the stag’s challenge. The mating season had begun.

  “What a terrifying sound!”

  “Sounds as if he meant it,” Harry answered. There was a disturbing male sarcasm in his voice. Helen ignored it. Alick and Donald were waiting for them. As they came up, Alick said, “It’s the twentieth of September. In Gaelic they call it the Day of the Roaring.” The quiet, half-humoured expression was on his face. They all stood together, looking up at the hills. From far in towards Benuain came another roar, much less in volume, but with an added impressiveness from distance. And then the first roar was repeated.

  “I think”, said Alick, “that he is in Coireglas. Hinds like that corrie for the flat of green grass in its lower end. You’ll often find a few of them there in the morning and evening.”

  “Do you think we should make for it?” Harry asked.

  “I think we should.”

  “Right!” He looked at the sky, but after the dispersal of the mist it was innocent of cloud. However, there was a distinct air of wind. “It should blow into the corrie from the main glen?”

  “Yes,” said Alick, “at a slant. Towards the middle of the corrie on the south side”—he drew the narrowed horse-shoe formation of the corrie with Harry’s staff—“it is steep, with some rocks, just here. If the wind is coming at that slant, as I think it is, then it hits this steep point and swirls round the back of the corrie and along the north side—to meet the incoming wind again.”

  “Which means,” said Harry, “that if we tried to do things along the north side we are liable to have our scent carried on the back eddy?”

  Alick nodded. Harry explained to Helen how, though moving against the general direction of the wind, one can run into a betraying eddy going the opposite way—dead into the wind. “Interesting, isn’t it?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Very. Are you going after the stag that roared?”

  “Yes,—but, of course, you never know.”

  “Quite. I see.”

  They all moved on, until at last Alick stopped Donald and told him to wait with the pony for further directions to be given by signal.

  “Aren’t you coming?” Harry, turning round, asked Helen.

  “I don’t think I should. I’ll just be in the way.”

  “No, you won’t. This is your day.”

  “Oh, I don’t think so. You have your stalk.”

  Harry looked at her. “You mean you would rather not?”

  She nodded. “Yes.” Harry still looked at her, uncertain of her motive, for she was capable of denying herself in any one’s interest.

  “Well—as you like. We’ll be an hour or two in any case, and, if we wound the beast, any number of hours.”

  “I’ll really enjoy myself here. I want to have a look around for any strange hill plants. Truly.”

  “As you say.” Harry raised his cap. As he was turning away, she smiled.

  “Please don’t wound him.”

  He smiled back, but in a constrained way.

  He’s put out that I didn’t go with him! she thought. Why didn’t I? She knew she wouldn’t like to see the stag actually being shot. She would hate it. Or so she imagined. But that did not interfere with her common sense.…

  She started talking to Donald, until she saw that though he spoke calmly enough and politely, he was really embarrassed by her presence. Besides, her only questions could be personal ones, and what right had she to inquire into his hopes or destiny? Yet she felt the seductive pleasure of talking to him, because of his dark eyes and black hair and dusky face and long eyelashes and an utterly indefinable quality of charm. Not exactly the shyness, the awkward grace, that flatters one’s vanity, nor altogether the unselfconsciousness that enchants by its natural ease. Actually Donald was rather a gauche, slightly overgrown youth, well fleshed, with hair blue-black and surely too thick, too luxuriant. And then she would see the smile open in his face, like a dark rose, and there she was!

  Unlike Harry, she was quite certain that this was not the charm that deceives. The charm that deceives is much franker, more ingenuous. It is not conditioned by anything, least of all by “morals”. Its deceit has a child’s face, a good man’s kindness. It is forgiven over and over—until it is despised and loathed.

  “Do you know anything about the plants that grow on the moor?”

  He did not know much, he said. So she left him and began to wander around, until her mind became a maze of colours and marsh and peat-ooze. I could go poking about like this for ever! she thought. She was intensely happy. She found deer’s grass crawling amongst the heather like green snakes. And once she lost herself in reverie, staring at the tiny flowers on a stalk of heath. So perfect they were, so beautifully formed, so rich in colour, and honey-fragrant. Her eyes caught a gleam of serpent humour as she found herself drawing the stalk slowly along her lips.

  She gave a small smile to herself and remembered Harry. Her teeth gleamed.

  That heavy man’s sarcasm at the roar of the stag! That dumb brutal male humour of the flesh!

  She was not letting it affect her much. She was too quick for that. Elusive as the wind! she thought.

  It will overtake you yet!

  Will it? she challenged.

  But after a time, she confessed, apropos of nothing:

  I shall go mad some time! I shall go clean mad!

  And she lay down, and drew her knees up to her breast, curled under the sun, and crushed her madness slowly, and let her mind escape.

  At the echoing crack of the rifle, her right hand clutched fiercely under her left breast. She felt a pain, no broader than a bullet, pierce her heart. She listened, mouth open. A second shot. She turned over, crushing against her elbows. Oh, Harry! she cried silently. Harry! And buried her face in the hard prickling heather. Then she got up, smoothed her face,
and wandered slowly back to Donald.

  That young man was eagerly watching the hill-tops and could not tell her what had happened.

  “Did he miss the first time?”

  “Yes.” Then he added: “Or may be he tried for a second one.”

  They stood there for a long time, but neither Harry nor Alick appeared.

  “Perhaps he wounded him,” said Donald.

  Helen’s face winced, as she asked what that would mean.

  “When you wound a beast, you have to follow him”, explained Donald, “until you kill him!”

  “Will that take time?”

  “It all depends. If he is badly wounded it mightn’t take so long, but sometimes you may have to follow him into another forest.”

  “But you must get him?”

  “If you can.”

  Helen nodded. Pain and death, pain and death. From the hills, from the moors. The incoming surge hurt and frightened her. Not to-day! cried her spirit. Oh, not to-day!

  “Does the wounded beast just run on?” she asked calmly.

  “If he is badly wounded, he falls out soon. He tries to find a place. Then you stalk him there.”

  “And the others run on and desert him?”