Stormy Petrel Read Online Free PDF

friendly, after all.
    I went slowly, and presently found myself walking towards a most spectacular sunset. Gold, scarlet and blazing flame I had seen before, but never like this, washing over the low clouds from below, and backed by the most delicate and limpid green which faded to primrose and then into the shadowy greys of the upper sky.
    I stood to watch. To my right was the small loch, edged with deep reedy banks of moss and thymy turf. The water lay smooth as glass, polished with all the colours of the sunset sky. Then something moved, and the shining world broke up into arrowing ripples, as a bird slid across the water, no more than a shape of black against the glare. A duck? Too big. A diver? It was possible. I had never seen one, but my brother had talked of them, and I knew that he was hoping he might find one here. As I screwed up my eyes against the dazzle, trying to see the creature so that I might describe it to Crispin, it vanished. Duck or diver, it had dived, and, though I waited for long minutes, it did not appear again. I walked on, and down the hill towards the cottage which, already, seemed like home.
    It is never quite dark on a clear June night in the Highlands. And never, in the long, light nights, do the seabirds cease from calling and flying. I went outside again that night, just before bedtime, to look at the stars. Back in the city, or in fact anywhere that I had lived, the night sky was disfigured by street-lamps and the city’s emanations. But here, in a clear arch of pewter-grey air, the stars were low and bright and as thick as daisies on a lawn. I picked out the Plough, and Orion, and the Pleiades, and of course the long splashing trail of the Milky Way, but that was as far as my knowledge went. Of one other thing I could be certain; the weather was changing. A wind was getting up, and even as I stood there, the lower stars were obscured by drifting darkness. The cries of the seabirds, muted, seemed to change, too. And the soft murmur of the sea. It was perceptibly colder, and the wind smelt of rain.
    I went indoors and to bed.
    During the night the wind got up, and the morning dawned grey and blustery, with bursts of heavy rain. Thankful that I had taken the trouble to gather dry wood while it was fine, I lighted the fire, and soon had a cheerful blaze going.
    And, once the chores were done, there was nothing to do but write.
    It is time, I think, to make a confession. Though I was a student of literature and, I believe, a reasonably good teacher, and loved my work, and though I was, moreover, a serious poet who had gained some small recognition in circles even outside my own University, my writing life was not confined to poems and articles, or even lectures. I wrote science fiction.
    Not only wrote it, but published it and made what seemed to a poorly-paid lecturer to be a very acceptable amount of money with it. Under another name, of course. The flights of Hugh Templar’s imagination paid Rose Fenemore very well indeed. They also gave her a much valued safety-valve for an almost too-active imagination. The pure invention of these tales, the exercise of what at its best can be called the high imagination, allow the writer (in Dryden’s phrase) to take the clogs off his fancy, and to escape the world at will.
    So through that dismal day Hugh Templar sat at his kitchen table and pursued the adventures of a team of space-travellers who had discovered a world directly behind the sun, which was a mirror-image of our own Earth, with the same physical composition, but with a rather different kind of population, a race having strange and, I hoped, thought-provoking ideas about how to run their planet . . .
    At ten o’clock the lights went out.
    Though normally, in the Highlands, there is almost enough light at that time to write by, the storm-clouds that had thickened and threatened all day made it quite dark. The fire had died to cold ashes, but I felt my way to where I had