PART ONE
CHAPTER ONE
1
EWAN MACLEOD was aware that his disgrace was known before the bus drew up by the small post office a hundred yards short of the hotel. The usual waiting group all looked at the outcast student, the older ones secretively, but the youngsters with a stare. His father, large and slow-moving, stepped forward with a small smile:
‘Well, Ewan, is it you?’ They shook hands. ‘Let me carry that for you.’
‘Oh no,’ replied Ewan, ‘it’s quite light.’
‘You’ve got home again,’ said Alan Ross, who was a great friend of his father. He was a thick-set man with a grey-black, bushy beard, a low-toned voice, and a quick glance. His shoulders hunched upward in an odd warmth.
Several greeted him. Ewan said ‘Yes’ to them, smiling, his dark eyes flashing here and there, the faintest colour beneath his skin, all in a way that might be mistaken for a natural touch of friendly embarrassment. In fact, it was surprising to them how normal he was about the whole affair. Eyes, when they could, peered at him with inhuman penetration, for he personated so much in the way of monstrous behaviour. So that later in any one of the little croft houses, a man might say quietly, ‘I saw Ewan Macleod coming off the bus to-night.’ The woman would glance up quickly, asking, ‘What did he look like?’ And the man would answer, ‘Oh, just as usual.’
The man’s words would hang themselves in the silence. Then perhaps the woman would say, ‘It’s his poor mother I’m thinking of.’ Or if she was another kind of woman she might say, ‘I don’t know how he has the face to come home! Bringing disgrace on his parents. He must be a bad rascal!’ And she would get into a heat about it and her virtue would be hurt and could not remain silent, as though it had all happened to herself. And another woman might say, ‘Well, she had always great ideas, and her brother had the money which he earned where he did. Little good of it has come to them, seem ingly.’ And so every house would live under the shadow of Ewan’s return. At length the man would go out and lean against a door-jamb or a gable-end, and stare into the darkening silence, and after a time would say to himself, ‘Thighearna, if I had been him, I think I would have stayed away altogether.’ And there would be in his heart a dark and uneasy condemnation.
Meantime Ewan and his father had started along the road towards the hotel, everyone looking after them. ‘There’ll be a sad home down there this night,’ one old man said. And a younger man muttered half-laughing, ‘Dhé, I wouldn’t care to be in his boots!’
The little boys and girls heard this, and stared after Ewan and his father, their mouths slightly open.
When they caught each other’s eyes, their faces twisted in a self-conscious way. But as they didn’t laugh, the boys’ bodies twisted also a little grotesquely, and then two or three of them started running away at a great speed till they came to rest all of a sudden on a grassy knoll near the cliffs. ‘Yon’s Ewan back!’ They stared at the sea, their faces smiling in an arrested awe. Then they began tumbling about the knoll. It was much as though they had overheard some man cursing and daring God to strike him dead. It excited them deeply, and every now and then they would pause and gaze in that smiling half-daring way, their eyes glistening.
The road rose slowly to the hotel, which with its white walls dominated this part of the world. It was an irregular building, for the original rectangle of stone had been added to, until now there were several chimney-shafts and out-flung back premises, the whole set against a flattish mound of twisted pines. The main gable was to the road, and the long front looked upon a deep glen.
As Ewan and his father approached this gable, which was on their left, they acknowledged several friendly greetings, but did not have to stop to speak. It was all a very delicate affair . . . until they saw Colonel Hicks stroll over to the roadside, smoking his cigar. The Colonel regarded them directly.
‘Evening, John.’
‘Good evening, sir,’ replied Ewan’s father.
But the Colonel’s whole business was to look on this young fellow. His face was drawn to a harsh restraint. Clearly Colonel Hicks could have said something to the point. His jacket, tightly buttoned about his full body, gave him a menacing dignity.
Ewan’s father hesitated awkwardly. As Ewan averted his look, which had suddenly become constrained and hostile, he saw his young sister Jean stand out from the kitchen premises and wave to him. He raised an arm, saluting Jean, and turned away. His father hesitated a moment, conscious of a sudden darkening on the Colonel’s face. Then he followed his son.
They turned their backs to the road and their faces to the sea, for a short cut led them along the crest of the valley and by croft dykes until the path went down steeply in grassy steps to the cleft in the rocks where their home was.
‘What’s Jean doing at the hotel?’ Ewan asked.
‘She’s just started work there,’ replied his father, ‘but she comes home at nights.’
A dryness flicked Ewan’s face.
‘I’ll take it now from you,’ said his father, and grasped the old Gladstone bag.
‘It’s not heavy,’ said Ewan.
‘Neither it is,’ said his father, surprised. ‘How’s that? I thought you would have some of your books in it.’
‘No,’ said Ewan, ‘I left them all behind in the lodgings.’
His father paused and looked at him. Ewan saw the dreadful hope in his eyes. Their faces gathered the bleak whitening that comes off the bone.
‘Did you?’ his father asked, huskily.
Ewan turned his face to the valley.
‘I left them all addressed to Uncle Will,’ he said.
There was a still moment. ‘Of course,’ nodded his father, ‘you would,’ and he went on, carrying the bag. Ewan coming behind him on the narrow path, gazed now and then at his back, at the movement of his shoulders, at the head lifted against the sea.
When they were about to descend the steep slope, his father paused, and without looking at Ewan, said:
‘Your mother is upset.’
‘Yes,’ murmured Ewan.
‘She feels it—pretty bad.’ His father lowered his eyes and regarded his left hand, moving the thumb over the finger-tips slowly.
Ewan did not answer.
His father looked at him and saw that his face was deathly pale and his forehead glistening. Then he looked at the sea.
For seconds their bodies remained stiff as if beyond their power to move. A moment of piercing divination came to Ewan wherein he saw their twin bodies caught up against a fateful eternity, not dark, but faintly silvered, like the far and utter loneliness of the sea.
‘We’d better be going down,’ said his father, and started, Ewan following him.
His father was perhaps no taller than himself, but he had a bigger frame, moved more slowly, and his eyes which were blue under dark hair had a more reflective steadiness. They would rarely be stirred or cursed by Ewan’s sensitive passions; but, given time, they might set sea and land in their place, and men against them in a just proportion.
As they stepped down, Ewan had the wintry freedom of being unobserved, and now and then as he cast a look at familiar places, at croft houses on the opposite slope, at the old curvings of the stream, at the two-plank bridge, his expression flickered bleakly. And once his eyes lingered on a house high up and to the left on the lip of a corrie where Colin McKinnon lived with his daughter Mary. His face was cold and worn, and when it smiled it had the secretive look of the outcast, strengthened with a sardonic understanding. Against the pallor of his skin his brown eyes appeared black and his lashes heavily shaded. With his damp forehead he looked ghastly and ill.
At that moment it seemed fitting that his home should be cut off from all the others. Here was its blue-slated mottled roof, the little plateau it stood on where the glen narrowed upon the sea, and no life moving about it. It was familiar and yet strange like a remote memory of a house come upon in the valley of a dream.
And now here he was walking from the brae-foot to its white gable-end with his mind empty of all thought, as if the whole thing were taking place in vacancy. Only the faintest tremoring ran over his flesh and centred in a melting way in his chest. As they came in line with the front of the house, Ewan saw little Annabel’s face snatch inward from the door. He smiled and began to breathe heavily, his lips flattening against his teeth before being licked by his tongue.
As they passed the window he felt his body against it.
His father went in first with the bag. The bag bumped a little against the short narrow passage. They were in the kitchen. ‘I’ll put the bag here,’ said his father, as he stooped to one side and left Ewan to face his mother.
The daylight was thinning and already within the kitchen with its one small window there was a faint gloom. Within this gloom the flat pale cast of his mother’s face seemed heightened in a way that left Ewan gazing at it, for he saw, what he had never quite observed before, the resemblance it bore to the face of her brother William. There was the same fixity, the same curious rigidity of condemnation, except that in her case instead of being combative it had a deadly calm.
She was standing by her chair near the fireplace, her body short and stout, her strong hair drawn straight back. She made no move to meet him. His head drooped and he looked aside.
‘Come in,’ she said in a voice that was level, almost indifferent.
What a welcome when he had returned before, what a bustling!
He walked into the kitchen, turning his shoulder to her.
‘Sit down there,’ said his father.
‘I’m all right,’ he answered, moving about, looking at things on the shelves.
‘Sit down and we’ll get a cup of tea,’ said his father. ‘You must be hungry.’
‘Oh, I’m all right,’ said Ewan.
His mother swung out the steaming kettle on the crook and filled the teapot. Everything was in readiness.
‘Where’s Annabel?’ his father asked.
No one answered.
‘Annabel!’ called his father, and waited. ‘I wonder where she can have gone to?’
His wife paid no attention whatever. The tea was ready.
‘You can sit down,’ she said. Then after a moment she called in a loud, dead voice, ‘Annabel!’
There was a stir in the gloom by the back door.
‘You can come in,’ said her mother with flat, unconscious irony.
Annabel entered, wriggling and shy. Her face had her father’s blue eyes, but her hair was almost fair, and blue and fair were alive in a perpetual sensitive flight. Her affections were so vivid that she was very attractive. She was eleven years old.
She stole into her chair and did not look at Ewan, her hands gripping tight under the table and drawing her shoulders together and her head downward.
Ewan did not speak to her.
No one spoke.
The father, because he was uncomfortable, ate in a large way. ‘Footch, the tea is hot,’ he said openly, and poured it into his saucer.
No one else had a word to say. The mother refrained from eating, neither ostentatiously nor unobtrusively. She simply did not eat. She stirred her tea in a deliberate way as if she were thinking about it, or about something else, or about nothing.
Annabel had put a piece of bread in her mouth, and it was so dry that it kept tickling the roof of her mouth in a strange ridged way. Once it tickled her so much that she nearly vomited.
Ewan stretched out his knife, cut a shaving of butter, and began to spread it on a piece of oatcake.
The flicker and flap of the peat flame became noisy in the kitchen. The mother drew a deep breath that tremored. They all heard it loudly.
Action became heavy and slow. A hand went out in a way that was secretly and intolerably observed.
All at once Annabel burst into tears, and getting hurriedly to her feet rushed sobbing from the kitchen.
‘Annabel!’ called her mother sternly.
Ewan muttered an excuse, got up, and walked out. After he closed the front door behind him, he stood still. So it was like that! The bitterness amused his face. The eyebrows lowered measuringly upon eyes that gleamed with a light that the features trapped. He heard his parents’ voices uprise and he walked away. He had no desire to overhear what they had to say. None.
He walked past the window and along to where a path descended steeply by the inner end of the rock that was the foundation of the green flat on which their house stood. The rock was twenty feet high, and soon he walked out from it the few paces to the stream which just here left its heavily bouldered course to spread itself upon a narrow beach of small, clean pebbles. Across the stream, the land rose again steeply but irregularly so that the little creek was roughly an indented half-circle, not a hundred yards across from outermost sea-rock to sea-rock. To the left, a flat spit, slowly submerging itself, acted as a jetty. At the inner end of this spit his father’s boat was drawn up on the pebbles, a rope from her head being tied round a great stone. To the left again of the boat and close into the hill was a tarred shed, in front of which were one or two grey lobster creels and odds and ends of gear, with two oars rising by the side of the shed and leaning their blades against the hill, which was very steep and all green grass. Across the inlet were no grassy slopes, the creviced rock rising sheer and dark. From the shed, the near chimney of the house could just be seen.
Ewan crossed the stream on the boulders that divided its last effort at a pool from the surrender of the beach, and so avoided the crunching pebbles.
The sea had a strange effect on him, lifting his loneliness to loneliness more complete. Its remote silvered light was cold and sterile, utterly without emotion. . . . How beckoning its farness! And deep; immense and deep.
Its breath came about him as he leaned against the boat; a tang that made the flesh shiver in the negation of emotion. How clean! how exquisite! And how cold!
Nothing mattered. Stared at, the sea forever moved without moving; it crawled on and was there. Far off, success was drowned and defeat was a spent murmur. The ultimate sea.
Within it, however, sound, like a choked human whimper; against the rocks. . . . Again, but close in; and all at once his heart jumped for it was beside him. He moved round the boat. Annabel got up and fled beyond the shed. He started to follow her and paused, his expression bleaker than the sea’s.
She was running away from him, terrified. . . . Poor Annabel, she must have had a bad few days after Uncle Will’s letter had arrived. How, forgotten, she would have been tortured, creeping down here and perhaps praying passionately to God! He had once overheard her pray for a doll round in the little cove at low tide. When she had come out afterwards (he had slipped away) she had looked self-conscious, as if daylight were not quite the right time to pray to God, and to do it in a cave was even more wrong. He had never forgotten that innocent look of guilt, and he had only once seen it again, on the face of a student girl who had just been passionately kissed for the first time and might equally well have been in illicit communion with Heaven.
Ewan’s expression, as he hesitated, listening, grew soft in disillusion. Blood sentiment touched him and his lips came apart in halfwistful irony. He started for the shed, stepping lightly, but did not surprise Annabel, who darted off before he rounded it. He raced a few steps, for he had her now between the sea and himself, but all at once pulled up dead and shouted in a hoarse voice: ‘Annabel, stop!’
She fluttered on the very rock-edge. His heart was racing sickeningly. ‘Annabel!’ raked his throat.
She stood looking back at him, her chin down-drooping, gathered into herself, but in some mysterious way conscious of her power.
‘Annabel,’ he pleaded, ‘come here.’
She did not move. As her head drooped farther, her face became almost completely hidden. ‘All right,’ he said, in a certain indifferent voice, and walked slowly away and disappeared from her sight round the shed, when he immediately drew up.
He waited there a long time, listening, his whole body intensely alive, his eyes glistening, like one who had waked out of a drugged dream.
At last he could wait no longer and pursing his lips as if to whistle, he walked casually round the shed.
Annabel had not moved, but her body had drooped more and she was quietly crying. Intuition told him that he could now walk up to her and that she would not stir or try to avoid him.
‘Annabel,’ he said softly, ‘why are you crying?’ He laid a hand upon her, but her body kept hard. ‘Annabel, don’t you like me?’ He drew her up against him. He sat down and took her on his knees, gathered her with an arm. ‘Annabel, little Annabel,’ he murmured. Then all at once the crown of her head came from against the pit of his chest and she clung to him, her nervous hands gripping at his clothes. She wept passionately, clutching at him in fistfuls. She burrowed into him. She could not get far enough in. She choked her mouth against him. And all the time he smoothed her hair with one hand, while the other held her close, murmuring odd sounds, looking over her passionate little head at the sea, until, grind his teeth as he might, his eyes filled, the sea wavered, and drooping his head to her hair he kissed her.
She felt this new and awful affection. It caught her where she was lost and brought her back. Her face crushed upward and she saw that his eyes were wet. For one shining moment her look remained wide. Nor did he try to avoid it, but into his own expression brought a smiling disillusion, letting it pass insensibly into a brotherly attitude of amusement, wherein he faintly and archly mocked her.
He saw her devotion glow. She read his face to its last character, to the twist of his lips that twisted her heart. She could not believe her fortune, and after gripping him fiercely wriggled from his hands and sped away on the excess of emotion.
The experience was one of wonder. Such family affection was never indulged in. Ewan stared out to sea a trifle ashamed, annoyed with himself for his wet eyes. Here he was, the victim, the scorned, the martyr, whose heart could never more be moved, near weeping over a little sister, aged eleven!
Emotion faded. His smiling face grew grey. But, unknown to him, light remained in its uplifted look.
2
The experience with little Annabel affected him within the next few hours in many ways. She was the opposite of the intellectual and rational processes pursued in his studies. To everything that had been ‘high’ in his pursuit of divinity, to steadfastness, to the subjugation of the flesh, to the asceticism of the spirit, she was—the emotion that he had experienced was—the temptation of weakness, of all those vague associations connected with man’s fall. Not so much the fall bodily as mental. The spirit losing grip on itself, permitting the athletic grouping of its cardinal beliefs to fall asunder within the high-walled city.
Colour and warmth and affection without measure, without order; the completely irrational, the betrayal: called the sin, the snare. Even little Annabel was a flame. . . .
As darkness fell on the sea, his body grew cold, and, deserted, felt for the flame.
But another took Annabel’s place. The shy flash of Mary McKinnon’s stormy eyes, the grown, moulding body. . . . The look that came on his face held more of guilt than Annabel’s when it had come out of the cave or the student girl’s when it had for the first time been passionately kissed.
In a moment he realised it and his satire grew bleak—and slowly challenging.
What were these forces of austerity and success but a cold, infernal pride. Let them defeat him and cast him out, he could see through and beyond. . . .
This warmth and sweetness—penetrating to the core of life. Life became beautiful before it. And the very earth caught its glow—the green and the blue, mountain wings in a rush of air—until understanding became profound.
Thought sent Mary out of his arms and left her in his heart.
Mary and himself, in this glen or another, the mornings, the evenings, with one or two neighbours like his father and Colin McKinnon and Alan Ross, and the young men not eaten by ambition, with their wives and children, flying children like Annabel, all alive like flames.
True, the vision again, as it had haunted him on that dreadful last night in Edinburgh; but looking at it coolly could he honestly say that there was any other that lured him more?
Thought entered his heart and Mary went out before it.
Speculation beat its fierce hawk-wings, ranging the ages. Christ and Gautama and Tolstoi—the leaders of humanity had all searched back for the lost glen of their vision, breaking, as a first step, the shackles of personal ambition and material success. That was the fact. The vision of what they searched for was greater than any vision they had ever had. And that word ‘shackles’—why? Because the spirit is held, is conditioned, by what the body strives for. Had he not seen it everywhere from professors who would be ‘teachers’ to a student like Lothian who despised only certain forms of success but would excel ruthlessly in whatever province he decided to work? Had he not seen it very clearly in the case of his uncle? His uncle was an admirable man not only in the eyes of the world but in the eyes of the Church. Out of ‘nothing,’ he had ‘worked himself up’—from a ‘lowest rung’ into a ‘pillar of the Church.’ Modern civilisation in its highest manifestation. The exceptional man, the flower of his age. That wasn’t exaggeration: it was the simple truth.
Even his uncle’s barman must concentrate on his job if he wants to get on, concentrate on it far more earnestly and far longer than on wife and child and home or social life. If he doesn’t, then sooner or later he will get sacked and slowly but surely ‘go under’. Apart from the exception, that is the inevitable course. It was the course his uncle had adopted in Ewan’s case. There had been no enquiry into why Ewan had had these students in his room, what forces and ideas had been moving him, what humanity meant to him, what he meant to himself—that last and most inscrutable of all enigmas.
Not that Ewan reasoned all this out step by step before that glooming sea. He had reasoned it all out so frequently that almost at any moment his mind could assume the viewpoint of the conclusion . . . and see it—and himself—in the thin cold light of the land of rejection. Touched now by a vanishing warmth of Mary.
But he could never find the solution that abided in that exquisite land of denial. Always the ironic moment came, as it came now, pointing its jeering thought at the striving of the visionary.
Make-believe! It was a terrible and blasting irony . . . wordless, because he had no curses.
He stood on the rocky spit, his figure dark against the night sea, then turned and came past the boat-house, crossed the steppingstones and went up under the rock on which his home stood.
But not up to his home, where his mother would no doubt be sitting brooding or, worse, going about the kitchen in that awful silence. How she had wanted him to ‘get on’! Oh, dumb heaven, how dumb your canopy to her now! Her son despised and rejected. . . .
The awful association gripped him like a blasphemy. As its first sharp rigour faded, he looked sideways at a moving self-importance so insignificant and impotent that it was laughable. A dark-drifting figure, its thought circling and bumping like a blinded moth. That was about the true extent of it! His body cooled to a whipped strength.
He followed the path that went up by the stream until it joined the main road beside the stone bridge.
He knew what was drawing him in this direction, as though the momentary warmth of Annabel’s body was still against him. Not that there was any chance of meeting Mary McKinnon.
He would see to that.
By devious ways, however, and with cunning, he worked steadily up the hillside towards Colin McKinnon’s cottage, pausing and listening, squatting when footsteps came, but going on with an ever-increasing fixity and almost fierceness of intention. The smell of the earth, the close contact with it, entered his blood. He sweated and breathed deeply. A feeling of relief and secret exhilaration touched him. Turning once, he saw the hotel with its lights on the crest opposite. Colonel Hicks, with glass at elbow, was probably telling someone of the young pup who had sold his parents and had had the brass face to come home again!
Some of the Colonel’s intolerance was released in Ewan. He sensed the man physically, smelt his cool superiority and assurance, and wanted to come at him darkly in a ruthless way. Something evil in the thought, secretive and of the night, squeezed Ewan’s mind in a cruel sweetness. He threw it off at once and went on, warily enough to elude an army, with an added vigour. Nor did he permit the usual upthrust of self-mockery. Why should he? Too much thought had made him a figure of indecision. Too much Christian idealism had made him live outside the world of men. The Colonel never had any indecision. Not for a moment. Ewan saw the face that had condemned him crush beneath his hands—then pulled himself up. In a moment Christian idealism looked at him with weary, sad eyes, that were his own eyes, smiling in a bitter, weary way. And in another moment the Colonel faded from his mind, because here was the light of Colin McKinnon’s cottage.
Colin had always been his friend. Colin had taught him the chanter whole evenings through. The last year or two he had not seen so much of Colin and even less of Mary. And now—he could see neither of them.
It was a new experience to lean there against the hay-stack with the hole in its side watching his friend’s house. The light in the cream blind was motionless and no shadow touched it. After he had stared at it for a long time, its stillness grew enchanted in a way that was sad and detached and inimical. Under the burden of it, little by little his senses ached. Life behind the motionless yellow blind was motionless too, like the head of an upright man bent over a righteous book . . . and the figure of a girl knitting with such unbreathing care that even her needles did not click, while now and then from under motionless eyebrows eyes secretly lifted and watched . . . without knowing it.
Colin and Mary, so far removed from him, that he could conceive Colin reading in a book with a Sabbath calm!
True, Colin might repudiate him. But if he walked right up and knocked on the door now, how well he knew that Colin wouldn’t! . . . And yet . . . supposing Colin did? As he would be bound to, in a way. Not an obvious way; hardly even with an obvious restraint. But still with that invisible veil of difference. For he would never question Ewan. And Ewan could never tell. A man may not justify himself to his friend. Not openly, anyhow, or directly. Perhaps . . . yes . . . in some moment of withdrawn intimacy that time and place hold as in an evening light, when the tones of speech become impersonal as the accents of a poem, and only the telling face moves in its remembering grief or bitterness.
But now, at this moment. . . . Ewan’s face moved in a slow satire. A debauched youth caught in a drinking orgy and thrown over by his own uncle. Drinking . . . and, no doubt, whatever usually went therewith. Wine and women!
Not that that in itself would in the profoundest sense matter to Colin. What Colin would despise him for most was not carrying his undertaking through. There was something mean about his defeat, and weak. A hidden pride would never have allowed it. Something worthless at the core, turning soft and rotten. Not the fine, secret Gaelic temper.
Yes, Colin, too, wanted success, but not so much the open success of the others—of, for example, his mother—as the hidden unyieldingness of the spirit that is like a sheathed blade.
Colin would not forgive him, could not, because the moment would come in the far reaches of his mind when he would despise him, that terrible moment of clarity which he, Ewan, knew so well. For Ewan had betrayed something more than himself. And not to many is the awful power of betrayal given. To less and less in this ancient land. Therefore how jealously must the few guard it! The secret of the heather ale! . . . hardly even a parable for the secret of the hidden steel.
As he gazed at the blinded window Ewan had a clairvoyance of intuition that saw his spirit stand naked—and shiver in the crystal light—and wither.
It was the profoundest intuition he had ever had, the most destroying. And the clarity was the purer for the ultimate truth that whatever he may have betrayed in the fight, he had not betrayed the secret spirit. Colin would never know that. A last tonic thrust that left the steel in his heart.
Then his mind sank.
His body came to with a violent shiver, and before thought could attack again, he walked away from the hay-stack. Almost at once he was aware at a few paces of a figure coming up the path towards him. It stopped, as he stopped. They knew each other through the darkness. As he started, she started.
‘Good evening,’ he said to her.
‘Good evening.’
‘I was going for a bit of a stroll,’ he explained.
‘Oh yes,’ she answered.
Her voice was distant and poised in a shy brightness. It drove everything out of his mind.
‘Were you in seeing father?’ she asked.
‘No,’ he replied, ‘I wasn’t in.’
She was carrying a parcel by the string. It swung round in her hand and her body pivoted slightly also. Ewan’s body swayed from one foot to the other.
‘Are you coming in?’ she asked.
‘No—thanks,’ he answered.
Their bodies moved again in the silence.
‘Well, I think I’ll go in,’ she said.
He had nothing to answer this time, and as she walked past him his flesh flushed to her nearness so that he gulped and choked a little; then started on his own way blindly, blindly smiling and filling his lungs to bursting point with air. His heart got skewered by a quick pain, so that all at once he could not breathe past a certain point. He stopped, gripping at his breast, and, looking back, saw the door open and close.
This cramp of his was amusing. He sat down and tested for it carefully. In a very short time it was quite gone. However—ah, hang it, he was tired, tired. He threw himself flat, his face into the grass, into the earth.
3
Late that night, Ewan’s father went down under the rock. It was very dark, but for that matter he could find his way blind-fold. The pebbles crunched under his feet as he crossed over to the other side and felt his way to the boat. His hand, outstretched, touched the gunnel and gripped it. Then he stood very still, listening.
After a minute he left the boat and went up to the shed. Entering, he pulled the door carefully shut behind him. After listening again, he struck a match, and in its light peered around. His eyes glistened, jumping hither and thither in a furtive way totally unlike them. The features, too, were drawn in an anxiety that all the time hearkened for the minutest sound.
The match burnt out. He trod on its red ember, and, outside again, latched the door. The night came against him darker than ever. He had not heard the sea before, for it was calm weather, but now the water lip-lapped, choked, and swirled back in invisible gurgling eddies. There was one very pronounced eddy low on the spit. He went towards it. The whole sea brimmed to his feet, choked and fell back, the water spinning over the shallow rock-edge . . . where suddenly he saw a pale patch the size of a man’s face. His heart stopped as he stooped to peer—when the odd reflection vanished.
Upright again, he looked seaward, then turned to the black shed, along the farther side of which he groped with hands and feet. He came back to the front of the shed, and stood hearkening. All at once his voice came harsh and unnatural:
‘Are you there, Ewan?’
He listened to his voice and to the silence.
Leaving the shed, he went back over the crying pebbles and up under the rock. He hesitated for a time near the footbridge then went back to the house. His wife looked up at him as he entered, the cool, large air of the night about him. His shoulder to her, he said:
‘It’s very dark about the shore.’
She did not speak and after a moment he glanced at her. She was knitting evenly, her face pale and set. She would not give in, he thought, though she had to sit there forever.
Something in the dour unyieldingness angered him. The clock struck eleven. She looked up at it:
‘It’s high time he was home.’
Her husband pulled out his pipe and lit it. Then he sat down and took off his cap. He smoked slowly and fully. But after a very short time he got to his feet again and put on his cap, drawing at his pipe more heavily than ever. He hesitated at mid-floor and said:
‘This is a strange house.’
She paid no attention to him, and his large, slow body made for the door, which he pulled quietly behind him.
She lifted her head and, hearing stifled sobbing sounds up above, went to the foot of the stairs that were steep as a ladder, and called:
‘Will you go to sleep there?’
No one answered.
‘Do you hear me?’ she called.
‘It’s Annabel,’ said Jean’s voice dourly.
‘Well, tell her if she doesn’t stop it I’ll come up to her.’
She listened a moment longer partly to hear but partly because she was now near the front door, which at last she had to open.
The night met her like a black wall. She thrust her head into it, then drew back and closed the door.
As she came into the kitchen, she paused for a moment by the table, her knuckles bearing heavily upon it.
It’s very dark about the shore.
She went slowly and sat down and gathered up her knitting.
Her husband, who was now crossing the bridge, was angry with her. And the more he got divorced from her, the more he sought the secret companionableness of his son. For there was in her tonight—had been in her for a week—some of the dour, hard spirit of her own people. Her face became flat in its discontent and in colour like the prickled skin on a plate of cold porridge. She would hold to that attitude, even should her son do away with himself.
The last thought swathed itself darkly. His heart constricted in him as he started up the river path, and his head turned to each side and listened. There was a small night wind which moved in a flat of rushes on his right. A curlew called overhead, the long tremulous cry travelling swiftly inland with the bird itself, tidings from the sea. Rain—or storm. . . . He disliked the sound of it, and already it was dying out afar off as if within death’s closing mouth.
What moved his wife was this: she had done the whole thing, she and her family—represented by her brother William. The Macleods had not a haepenny, and, in any case, could hardly understand a sacrifice for learning! She had got round William. And William had the satisfaction, the sanctimonious satisfaction, of educating a Macleod, or, at least, of starting to educate him and then—breaking him. Well, well, it was a pity perhaps that Ewan did not go through with it when he was at it—but, damn them for having broken the boy and driven him—out into the dark—like this. . . .
His step firmed. His body moved strong and unyielding. If this man were driven to vengeance his hands would come together slow but deathly sure.
He caught at footsteps and stopped.
‘Is that you, Ewan?’
‘Yes.’ The footsteps approached.
‘We were wondering where you were,’ said his father.
‘I was out about,’ replied Ewan.
‘Oh yes,’ said his father.
They could hardly see each other and stood there in a moment’s penetrating intimacy.
‘Well, we’ll go home,’ said his father. ‘Your mother was getting anxious.’
And all at once Ewan knew with a strange and dark surprise that they had conceived the thought that he might do away with himself.
When his father remarked that one could hardly see the road, he agreed, but he was really walking within this new thought. It at once set him aside and lifted him up. It had a veiled importance and attraction. With the body absolutely weary, annihilation was another name for sleep. It had never hitherto come before him, not anyhow face to face. . . .
‘Were you in anywhere?’ asked his father.
‘No.’ And Ewan followed his father’s train of thought until it asked:
‘What were you doing?’
‘Oh, I had a bit of a walk.’
His father was friendly. Ewan could feel the warmth in his voice; at the first word had heard the relief that yet was no more than an easing of the breath. But between them, the shadow of his defeat; and this new strange thought of suicide. He felt shy and would have walked away from this man now if he could. Yet they were held together by a bond darker than the darkest thought. He was a youth within the circle of his father’s being, as if tied by a cord to his father’s loins. His father was a grown man, like Colin: the final arbiters of that secret spirit which he had betrayed.
The wind whispered in the flat of rushes; the planks across the stream echoed their footsteps.
‘Are you hungry?’ his father asked.
‘No,’ said Ewan definitely. ‘I don’t want anything.’
His father opened the door and entered.
‘Come in,’ he said aloud and companionably.
As Ewan entered the kitchen his mother looked up at him. But his eyes, blinking in the light, found a chair, upon which he sat down.
‘It’s very late,’ said his mother.
Lifting a leg on to his knee, he began to unlace a shoe, faintly smiling at her tone. When his mother’s eyes lowered to her knitting he looked at her, the squat upright body, the prickled face, the strong hair caught straight back so that it seemed to be pulling at the temples. His smile faded out at a mouth corner. He stood up in his socks, hesitated a moment, then without a word turned to go.
‘Have you a light?’ asked his father.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ muttered Ewan as he went out of the kitchen, hearing behind him his father’s voice, ‘Is there a candle?’ and his mother’s flat reply, ‘There’s a candle in the room.’
He did not light the candle.
It was cool to lie full stretch between the sheets and hear the sea again, the sea about the rocks . . . about his youth. Had he ever heard it quite silent? . . . Never. Always that faint murmur . . . lifting its sea-shell upon the ear of the night. How lonely and exquisite to be finally cast out, with nothing any more to hold to, to hope for. To be purged of every relationship, to be left bare. In the Gaelic poem, the girl said, abandoning herself to her betrayer:
‘You have taken east, and you have taken west from me,
You have taken from me the path before and the path behind me,
You have taken moon, and you have taken sun from me,
And great is my fear that you have taken God from me!’
4
As he lay on his bed an odd detachment came upon him and for the first time in four days and nights, the emotions of that last fatal night in his Edinburgh lodging could be tranquilly remembered. Though he had foreseen then the reception he would get on his return, he had not foreseen the decision he would come to this night, without effort, without even conscious thought, and yet with finality. He knew exactly what he was going to do to-morrow.
Through the clear relief of this he was even able to look back with a certain curiosity. The whole evening in Edinburgh could be felt as in the flashing past of upstanding posts, but it could be seen too at any point in detail. The first point was probably the appearance of the landlady ushering in the two extra students. The entry might have been deliberately timed to pick up Lothian’s oaths. How shocked the withered old woman had been! She had kept gazing at him, Ewan, until he had had to say, ‘Thank you, Miss Bryce.’ They all turned and looked at the haggard witchlike face, with its profound disapproval. It started mumbling. ‘Thank you, Miss Bryce,’ he had said to her again, but in a way there could be no mistaking. And she had gone out.
This cold dismissal of her—a new experience in itself—had released him, and any reluctance there might have been to use the bottle of wine which Lothian had produced from a pocket, calmly disappeared.
Lothian was, of course, at the root of the whole evening. With his slight, fair, neatly dressed appearance, he had that crisp assurance which was so very effective. Being a medical helped him. And when the others had ragged him because he had been the only one who had got a mere d.p. (duly performed) passmark, he had let them have it.
It was the first time that he, Ewan, had ever offered to celebrate examination results, and the purchasing of the bottle of port, which the five of them had been drinking up to this point, had cost him much thought, and as though the others felt this in some way—for he was, besides, the only one of them ‘of the cloth’—it produced in them a heightened, reckless gaiety.
Lothian’s attack on the first-class man had been characteristically sweeping: an imitator, a swot (he had declared), a coward frightened to death that he would break his reputation and so given to sweating at exam. time—all through the night—that the bedsheets. . . . Whereat Munro had got so hurriedly to his feet that the chair overbalanced backwards and he had landed on the floor with a loud crash.
The gaiety increased. But when at last Ewan was called upon for his speech, an odd momentary silence had touched them, as though in an inexplicable way the whole evening hung on something in him, which was, as it were, the ghost at their heart!
He had supported Lothian. Facts and laws had to be known precisely and he assumed that Lothian was not against these as such. He would put Lothian’s attitude into a question: Why should a man who swots up facts out of a book be considered a higher type than, say, a man who sails a boat? Or why should a man who does the counting at a desk be considered more important than the man who made the things that are counted? Not imitators so much, perhaps, as by-products of the doers. . . . When he had finished he had turned to Lothian, ‘Is that your point?’
‘Exactly,’ said Lothian, watching him. ‘Won’t you finish your wine?’
He had hesitated a moment. . . . ‘Even if it is contrary to my ideas!’ and emptied his glass.
But Lothian’s mind was not satisfied. The wine, too, was carrying him beyond the first stage of artificial brilliance. There was something he wanted to be at. He tried to shut up Munro who, as a football ‘blue,’ was beginning to tackle rather obstreperously. ‘Let us have another drink!’ he cried.
This had brought Ewan uncertainly to his feet, whereupon in a moment he saw the amazing thing happen in Lothian’s mind. Lothian suddenly wanted to be at him, to tear the veil from the smiling, dark, damned Highland fellow! The desire for the torturer’s satisfaction was in his eyes! And yet certainly, up to that moment, Lothian had had nothing but the friendliest and most generous feelings towards him. And even now he had to turn on another, shouting, ‘Baird, you’re a blasted metaphysical fool! Your wits gather wool in a damned fog!’ At which moment the door had opened and the landlady had ushered in the two new guests.
When at last she had gone, one of the newcomers said to Lothian, ‘I say, Lothian, you were fairly going it.’
‘Wass I?’ enquired Lothian, raising his eyebrows. The assumption of the other’s West Highland accent was a piercing mockery to which the newcomer, MacTaggart, responded with a smile that only succeeded in showing its instant venom. But Munro rocked on the couch, spluttering, ‘Lothian’s squiffed. He’s tighto. Know what he was trying to make out?’ He got to his feet and staggered slightly, and so drew all minds, laughing, upon himself.
The port, however, had begun to have quite a real effect upon their unpractised stomachs. As time went on, each became conscious that he might have to give himself away, and so began to talk and laugh the louder, to banish the possibility of squeamish surrender. Through the thick blue haze their faces jerked and laughed. In the end Munro began to sing—and, of all things in such company, a Gaelic air. But clearly he could not think of any other and he had to sing. The last defiant thing he could do. And when the cushion bowled him over, he sat up again, singing all the time, singing for dear life, his face turning slightly green.
The uproar steepened. Lothian, the finished Lowlander, desired it to be known that he detested that ‘maudlin Celtic-fringe muck’. Munro never heard him, but in a revealing moment Ewan knew that the remark had been meant for MacTaggart and himself, the sensitive Gaels! And Lothian was only too well aware that MacTaggart preferred to suppress his Gaelic origins!
He, Ewan, had turned on Lothian and smiled. Lothian had seemed unable to remove his eyes. A naked, penetrating moment—from which Lothian had swung round and shouted above the hubbub:
‘Shut up, Munro, you Hielant b—!’
Whereupon, as at a signal, the door had swung open and Uncle William had stood on the threshold.
That compact awful body with the small eyes that looked all the smaller for being wide open in the pale fleshy face with its clipped grey beard! The effect had been startling enough for them all. But for Ewan there had entered—the executioner.
Even the silence had caught something from that grey dreadful doom, until Munro, slewing round from his position on the floor, stared—and belched loudly.
For Ewan the crushed mirth had been agony. But Uncle Will had soon silenced that. He had left nothing unsaid. Nothing. Ewan’s poverty, his mother’s ambition to have her son in God’s pulpit, his own money for the purpose: the whole thing blisteringly, with a wrath in restraint that could plainly have lashed them all with its scorpions.
It had all meant, of course, that his uncle had got him at last. As a godly man he would naturally have shown anger in any case; but here was perfect justification for the open flowering of their secret enmity; he could now rake up and blot out. And in his desperate fight for appearances, he, Ewan, had felt himself look anything but penitent, had caught indeed at his reserve, at the old fatal reticence which had introduced so early in their relations the poison of suspicion.
Even when Lothian had stepped forward and with superb courtesy had begun, ‘I am sorry, sir, that you should have witnessed this scene. Mr. Macleod here is not to blame for it. It is I who took this wine and these men—’ he had been impelled to interrupt him: ‘One moment, Lothian. Please remember you are my guest.’ And Lothian had winced as if he had been struck.
Uncle Will might have been struck too, judging by the fierce quickening in him, and violence might have followed, had not Munro chosen the moment to be sick, opulently and on the carpet. The horrible business in that blue atmosphere provided Uncle Will with his obliterating climax: ‘And you’ll go back to your vomit! That’s what you’ll do!’ The door crashed loudly behind him.
Whereafter he had felt quite cool, smiling before these fellows. He had felt not so much cool as in some unearthly way liberated, as if he had moved out of himself or shed something. He had gone over at once to Munro and caught his shoulder. ‘It’s all right, Munro.’ Bent down and tried to lift him up. Munro, who knew more intimately than the others what it all meant, had flopped and burst into tears. The others had come round helpfully; all anxious to do something to wipe out the moment. And when Munro beat the floor fiercely with his hands, shouting through his tears, ‘O God! O God!’ they had laughed, relieved, and finally cleaned up the mess with handkerchiefs. He had seen them all out, calling cheerful farewells, in good form, and returned to his room, when all at once his body began to tremble.
He had listened for the landlady and then gone into the dark lavatory; got down on his knees but soon found he could not be sick. The straining brought a cold sweat to his forehead, and he came back into the room. His landlady was there, sniffing for fire about the oilcloth floor with a pinched intense concern.
He had told her it was only a burnt handkerchief. But her face with its misery of condemnation excited him and an inward warmth crept in a flush over his brain so that he had sat down heavily.
She said, ‘It was an awful night.’
The tumblers clinked, her fingers going deep into them. The image came before him of mouths drinking from those places where her black-seamed fingers went. She wetly sniffed. She was excited too; a gentle repressed creature, a withered maiden. He had been such a nice young man—studying for the Church. You wouldn’t know you had him in the house—that mannerly and quiet. ‘Good morning, Miss Bryce.’ ‘Good night, Miss Bryce.’ Her shrewish misery could reach the verge of tears. For she had something to say. Oh she had something to say. And she said:
‘Your uncle heard it all. He was in an awful state.’ The glasses trembled and clinked. Her knuckle-knobs shook. ‘He said to me—as he was going out—that, that he wouldn’t be responsible—any more.’
‘I see.’
‘He asked me what you owed. I told him you did not owe me anything until the day after tomorrow. He paid that.’
‘Oh.’
There never could be tears in her dried body. Only misery and damp sniffings to the brain. She hesitated at the door, wrung with ineffectiveness. Suddenly, however, she threw him a searching and surprising look. Then she passed out.
He had got up at once and started about the room again. Finally he had got his cap and headed for the Blackford Hill.
When, hours later, he had got back to his room, he had felt his body purged. Its exhaustion would bring on sleep at once.
But it didn’t. His wakefulness had become abnormally acute. It had sharpened to a point where he had cried, ‘Oh-h . . . what will they say at home?’ Had gripped the bedclothes and drowned his mind in violence.
So that night of unspeakable torment had begun.
For up to this point there had been at the back of his mind, wordless but there, the conviction that what had happened, being an end of all the human relations in his life, meant that he would, could, never more go back home. It had meant that he had to ‘clear out’. Although he had been condemned, he had also in this new sense been freed.
But immediately he admitted this freedom to himself its sustaining influence became suspect. To ‘clear out’—was such a manly gesture! Simple, sweeping, positively splendid in its brave decision!
The irony of this had developed a curious disintegrating power. It penetrated the mockery till it saw between the flesh and the bone, drew away the flesh from the dry bone.
To clear out was too easy. It evaded vision. It evaded everything. And vision can never be evaded. Like a flame it had burned everything away to the final truth and left him staring at that. For it was not that he would sit on some roadside of the world and think of his mother and father and homefolk and what was said of him, and the gloom, and the way his mother would close up; it’s not that he would see all this in a silent malignant growth of shame shadowing his old home to the far-off darkening of death; not that he could not stand against these, if need be, though his heart died in him for sorrow of it: but that deeper, profounder still, the evasion would blast that final core of integrity that was himself, the white core before which the flesh shivers in exaltation and fear.
For not to betray that core is always to suffer martyrdom. There is no other way out.
Whatever happened to him after, he would first have to go home.
How his mind had risen into an exquisite apprehension of just suffering! He had felt his face as he walked his road grow white and quicken, the air cold upon its lifted look. The road went on and down . . . and there was his home.
Ah, but he would go out when the darkness came. . . . To Colin McKinnon’s? Mary . . .
As Mary McKinnon’s face with its dark stormy eyes had flashed before him, all his high martyrdom had crumpled and he had turned over and smashed his face into the pillow.
Bitterness had got crushed out of his body’s contortions like a poisonous sweat. When at last he had thrown himself on his back, consciousness was little more than a trembling mist that at any moment might lift and pass.
It did not pass, however; it steadied and cleared; and presently his uncle’s face had uprisen, broad flat crown to tapering chinwhisker. The flesh was full; strong sparse grey hairs stubbed the cheek bones; its unrelenting expression never wavered.
A murderous hatred of it had obsessed him as he gazed at it.
Yet even at that moment he saw what was in it of righteousness. For his uncle had worked himself up from a barman to be the owner of a pub in a slum, and now believed that this had not been his choice but his fate. He had the mind for higher things. But even if he were classed with sinners and God were against him, yet would he be all the juster on that account. . . . Without issue, he had been prepared to make an offering of this child of his sister. And the child by an evasive quality in him had slowly raised doubt and, thrusting out of that, a chill bitter enmity. To-night he had probably learned to his satisfaction why the child could never open out his secret mind!
From that face he had turned away on his pillow, for there was no charity in its unyieldingness, none—no more than in God’s face. His spirit had cried out that charity was only in Christ’s face, in the kind understanding eyes of Christ, in that look before which one’s soul rose up glad and flushing.
That’s why he had been drifting away from the dogmatists and the theologians and their text-books. Oh, he knew the impulsive soul had to be disciplined. Youth had always wanted to break away, to rebel, to fly into—chaos. He was no exception. A tiny entity. He knew that, for the love of exquisite learning was somewhere in the marrow. Not boastful learning, or learning for its own sake, but learning for its amber honey.
But honey in the end—not dust.
Not dust, O God, or our throats choke and we die. Not righteousness of the publican, not uprightness, not any of the virtues—none of them. They are too hard, too obvious, too iron-clasped to be chalices for the spirit.
To be first—we worship that—everywhere. And it wasn’t enough. Ah, not only that, it missed the whole point, it missed the essence, the honey of the world’s delight, the fragrance of the spirit’s flower. It was too easy, too boastful, too ravenous of time. It licked up the spirit and left the husk—for the acclamation of the multitude. It was wrong. It wrung the heart of the world till its spirit fainted.
Feeling his own spirit faint, he had sat up in bed to recapture it. He had looked about him in the dark room and presently found himself hearkening to the odd bits of furniture. The furniture listened back, still and dark-looming, and no sound was made. No sound in the room, no sound outside the room . . . and far beyond to utmost boundaries, to the sky, no sound. . . .
From a great distance came back into focus the field of his mind . . . slowly gathering the green of grass, the tumble of the sea; gathering colour and shape, the sweep of a mountain, the bright acres of the crofts. Figures became recognisable; they moved slowly, as if time were a benediction and space the windswept playground of thought.
This might be reality extended into the dream, the colours intensified, the humans endowed with wisdom and lit eyes. But its pattern was abiding, its essence true, and its truth desirable.
This had come upon him with a calm and ineffable certainty.
He had known then that it had been at the back of his mind always as an unconscious standard. Against it had been measured lecturers and publicans and class divisions and success, without effort of his will. The hard, the brilliant, the pushing . . . were in that ultimate place the gestures of bad manners. Bad manners because insensitive, and given to measuring matter against and over spirit. As if anything between two human beings can interest but the gesture of the spirit. There is nothing else but the spirit that looks through the eyes and moves the body as wind moves a tree. The very phrase ‘bad manners’ is in itself so insensitive that one would avoid it, while meeting eyes glance and smile in a faint embarrassment.
Nor was that refining it too far. For such sensitiveness meant not less strength but more. Driven far enough, it turned an edge of steel, razor-thin, without mercy. He could penetrate his uncle with an insight so clear that it was cold and destructive. He could destroy him with his hands, knowing no emotion beyond the sustained constriction of his own body. . . .
His emotion had overwhelmed him again, until once more the vision cleared.
His father, out in the open, sun and wind and land and sea. Night with lonely friendly lights in the darkness. Colin McKinnon playing ‘The Lost Glen,’ so that the darkness becomes an ache and the glen extends to a universe set with stars. That emotion of space, how impersonal and how quivering sweet! The first shudder before art; man’s shudder before God’s art. And no man may know God, any more than he may know art, until he is alone.
Was not that the place that his race had come out of? And was it not the spirit that his race had forever been concerned with? Not matter, not grubbing, not success, not ‘getting on,’ but the play and the sparkle of the spirit in music and fun and work in the open and—poverty? No, not poverty, any more than Christ’s poverty, or Socrates’. And even if frugality in these latter days had become too frugal, whose fault was that? The land of the Gael, the shorehaunts of the Norseman—what held them now?
Why was that great spirit in eclipse and passing—with here a slum-world congested like men in a pub, his uncle’s face behind them, that unwavering face, rising ghost-menacing above a dark movement of infernal heads?
Sometimes he had hinted as much—and been laughed at. Lothian dismissed the ‘pretty-pretty antiquated tosh.’ Baird had drawn a parallel to the ‘poetry of escape’. They could not see the awful spiritual principle and its eternal significance.
The ‘poetry of escape’—that leads to martyrdom!
Within the grandeur that was Rome, Christ’s ‘poetry of escape’—that led to crucifixion. Within the greatness that was Greece, Socrates’ white core of integrity—that led to the poison bowl.
With an awful virginity he had seen the thought of Christ and of Socrates with a finality too profound to bear. These last years he had moved within the white verge of Christ’s mind. Not that he had ever become familiar with Christ. He had never even prayed to Him direct. He had looked from afar at the picture of The Last Supper. How could one approach Him? How dared one—ask? To intercede, to beg . . . how self-important. Yet now and then, in a tranced moment, he had seen Christ as it were at a little distance coming down by a ripe cornfield, plucking an ear or two; and when he had seen Him, without turning his head he would whisper quickly to a friend, ‘Look, there’s Christ.’ And they would both grow shy, but hold to their way with beating hearts.
Until at last his vision had got exhausted also and all his body streamed away from his eyes, from the dark bony rounds of his eye-sockets. Even when he lay perfectly still, it streamed away. Quiescence and sinking would no more come upon him. The alternation of convulsion and calm had got broken. His mind was getting broken, its circling parts moving out and out . . .
Lying here in his bed at home, the murmur of the night sea in his ears, Ewan refused to remember any more. The experience had been too intense. There were moments when his body had been burned away and his spirit had attained an utter clairvoyance. Too terrible now. So terrible that already its crisis was behind him, its white purity, and he was drawing away—drawing away from his youth. . . . It was as well that he had gone through it; better that he had fought these four days homeward (the humiliation of them he never wished to call to mind). The fight comforted him, lying here in bed, listening to the sea in the windless night; made his tomorrow’s decision not only inevitable but friendly. Listening, he fell into a profound sleep.