It was Tuesday, blue-skied, and Simon Grant was enjoying himself with the earnestness which time leaves alone. He had his reflex camera, with large focusing-screen, whose reactions were known to him intimately, naked or in filter, together with its head-like movements on the universal joint of its telescopic tripod, and he called it, with obscure but pleasurable irony, his innocent eye. Before its pictures, the scientific critics bowed down. His prismatic compass, which he could carry before him as a deacon his church-offering, gave him his ground angles, and his Abney clinometer his vertical angles. He had his linen measuring tape, his rulers, his numbered pegs, and many odds and ends besides. He had his daybook for recording both his actual doings and his vagrant ideas. And finally there was the drawing-board, with its squared paper, upon which were set down in their true spatial relations all things that he deemed necessary for an accurate plan of cairn and circle.
It was exciting work because he made it exquisitely exciting; he was so happy that he looked stern; and not, indeed, until he was finally rough-checking the height of the cairn, as ascertained by line and angle, did his world collapse. The check consisted in the simple process of measuring the cairn against his own eye-height: thus, he climbed up until he got the top of the cairn on a level with his eye and then noted with care the stone upon which he stood; having climbed down backwards until he got this stone on a level with his eye, he now noted the next stone upon which he stood and saw that when he got to earth he could measure its height from the ground against his yard rule; but as he kept his eye on this final mark and stepped down an unstable stone threw him backwards and, but for the luck that was with him, he might have dislocated his spine.
Anna found him lying twisted on the grass, but when she kneeled and put her hand on his brow, he opened his eyes at once, stared at her for a moment with an odd remoteness, and sat up. Slapping a hand to his side, he yet smiled as he saw the death fear fade like a frost from her face.
“I had a tumble and felt a bit sick,” he explained. “Am all right. Absolutely.”
“Granny was wondering why you never came home for lunch.” Warmth was invading her face.
“It’s not that time!” He looked at his watch. “Three o’clock! Good gosh!” He had anticipated being finished with his map-work by one, and had hoped to spend a pleasant afternoon at home inking-in the pencil on his plan and having everything ready for a working start on the cairn in the morning when Foolish Andie and his mother were due to appear. “I’m sorry, Anna.” He looked at her with mirth in his eyes, for in his five days at the cottage he had grown fond of her in the friendliest way.
“It’s all right,” answered Anna smiling, for it didn’t matter how many hours he was late if he was all right himself. It was that kind of blessed cottage. “Are you finished?” The reserved politeness of her voice had its unvarying charm.
“Yes. Do you think you could give me a hand home with some of the gear?”
“Yes, sir. Surely.”
He got up carefully but was all right except for a bruised feeling down his right side. He stretched himself exaggeratedly, saying, like an embarrassed schoolboy, “Don’t call me sir, Anna. I have a great respect for your granny and yourself—and especially for Sheena. If we left these pegs in the ground I don’t suppose anyone would touch them?”
“I don’t think so. But I could easily——”
“We’ll chance it.”
They went home together.
Later that afternoon, with his plans and inks before him, he found himself thinking about her as he stared out of his sitting-room window. The Colonel might say he was a romantic, but he knew himself as very shrewd. Her unfortunate predicament naturally drew his sympathy but did not cloud his judgement. She was no wanton. That was certain. But she had a softness, a kind deep softness. Yet even that lay, as it were, like a beauty between her strong bones. There was a certain light in her eyes, when she was momentarily embarrassed and glanced away, which had something beautifully tragic in it. She was no wanton, but, with her affections stirred, she might be misled, wholly and fatally, and, he concluded, perhaps with no vast difficulty.
He nodded, pressing his lips together, and a frown came between his eyebrows. He had a hunch that some soldier had done it who wasn’t engaged to her and wasn’t killed. Had it been a true case of her boy being killed, he would have heard the story before now. This was the kind of cottage that did not make up such a story for appearance’ sake. And from many signs—the postmaster’s expression in Kinlochoscar, to begin with—he had come to know that there was no story but the very ancient one of a lassie being left with the baby. His frown deepened as anger probed, for it still remained amazing to him how any damn fellow could have deserted a girl like Anna. She was a practical, hardworking, kind-hearted girl, but she was also at moments a distinguished woman, who, dressed up and bearing herself with her natural reserve, would stand out in any company. I should think so! And not much of the right company left for her to stand out in, by God! he concluded with some spirit and wrath.
He got up and poked at his side, which was still bothersome but not much. Her face came before him with the fear on it, the lips parted, the eyes wide, and—the solicitude. It was the only word he could think of. Care and thought, a natural kindness, for other people, that was what distinguished them, what was innate, he decided. And from them his vision jumped to social levels where this quality was not so innate, where on the contrary it was eaten up by an egotism that lived on itself like a rotten cheese.
The happy image restored some of his good humour and he got back to his inking-in. But after supper, with Anna gone to Kinlochoscar, he was in the mood for talk with the old lady, for he had noiselessly opened his door and overheard a new magic story and a new lullaby.
“No, it’s more than bairns’ talk,” he assured her. “It’s out of stories like these that we try to reconstruct the past. For, after all, why should there be magic stories, why should man have been pleased with a magic story? What is it in Sheena that makes her want a story like that above all else?”
“I’m sure I don’t know,” said the old lady.
He laughed, as if her smile had communicated something esoteric, instead of showing an inaptitude for speculative discourse.
“But you see what I mean? Why is man haunted, for example, by the story of the Fall? Why should it have come into his head at all that he had fallen from anything? If we haven’t fallen, but actually climbed, why isn’t it the climb that—that’s the thing?”
“When you fall you hurt yourself,” she said, “and you remember that. Are you feeling quite well now?”
“Yes,” replied Mr Grant in mazed mirth. “Quite well.” He glanced at her to make sure his ebullience was not misunderstood. “And Anna was so kind to me.”
“Yes, she’s a kind girl.”
The quiet tones did not nearly express enough for him, and when he heard her even quieter tones, saying, “She was in the A.T.S. when she fell,” he was so full of his own fall and Anna’s solicitude, that he cried:
“Oh! Did she hurt herself?”
In the gaping silence, the true meaning, of Anna’s “fall” and the birth of Sheena came at him, and he stood appalled, his hot blood flooding his body, which went stiff as a grotesque figure in a magic story.
She was now looking at her knees, which her hands smoothed nervously, smiling in a strange way. The sad smile was being invaded by a queer earthy humour. She got up, muttering something about “keeping him”, and went out. Still transfixed, he listened without breathing and heard what sounded like cackles of laughter.
He moved about, stretched his legs and felt himself stretch longer, choked back his laughter and doubled over his bruised side. The choked laughter was grotesque and tragic; charged with a wild humour he wanted to let rip. “What an idiot!” Ashamed of himself beyond thought, he shook in the armchair.