The Shadow Read Online Free PDF Page B

an act. Nan’s new act. Oh God, Ran, Ran, it’s terrible! With the world as it is, it’s terrifying.
    I am writing all this in snatches, in little spurts. I may not send it to you, or not all of it. I’ll see. I feel awfully lonely sometimes. Like a child. Like one that’s never grown up. (And that immediately brought in Barrie. Just as a moment ago when I wrote about wanting the sun I thought of the young artist, going blind from his father’s disease, crying to his mother for the sun in that play of Ibsen’s. The free literary associations from our moderns! How ghastly! Will there be no end to it—until the ends of the world come upon us, soon?)
    The hypersensitive condition of the convalescent! Of course. I know quite well. And if I’m going to get physically fit for London again it’s high time I was sensibly busy about it. This time there wouldn’t be a blitz, no excuse for breaking in bits in your hands on the spot. So as Aunt Phemie was going to the market town, five miles away, I set out for the wood and the moor and the hill burn.
    I suddenly hate to worry you further with doleful thoughts (how moods change in the course of a letter!) so I shan’t tell you how the wonder was gone from the grass and the leaves and even from the wild flowers. I plodded on. That murder of the old man hadn’t done me any good. You know what I mean, Ranald, quite simply. I had seen dead bodies and bits of bodies in London town and helped where I could. I was sick often, but never mind. I was tough as most and it took what followed to get me down. I can only ask you to believe me when I say that this murder was for me more horrible in my imagination than what happened in London from bombs. For this was the living figure of destruction, this was the murderer, come away from the city where he had been impersonal and many-shaped, shapes flying across the sky, come at last to the country, to the quiet countryside, to prowl around on two feet and smell out a poor old man and murder him for his money.
    But, Ranald, I mustn’t tell you about the awful images I had of him. He was at once a real human being and, as my thought and sight whirled away like wild birds from the lines on his face, a mythical one, with stooped shoulders, moving darkly through the pattern that Farquhar’s cottage made with the high land. But I mustn’t tell you. I mustn’t give you the detail. Be patient with me, please, Ran. I cannot tell Aunt Phemie of that inward place. I couldn’t tell you face to face. Perhaps I am only telling myself out loud by writing. My brain at times works like lightning. Aunt Phemie took the pendulum off the old clock this morning. You should have heard time galloping! After that word writing—before I had got it down—I went through a sort of lifetime of experience beginning with an understanding of why a child speaks out loud to itself. And I don’t mind saying that, whatever you think, because, Ranald, I also had an awful intuition of how human beings suffer in secret. It came upon me. I joined millions of them in all their prison camps, their inward places …
    If you’re alone on a moor by a burn you can shout out quite loud to yourself: Oh, stop it! And the very sound of your voice stops it! Good, isn’t it?
    It’s quite a bare moor. It slowly dips down to the burn and then up to the mountains. As it goes on its way, however, it enters a gorge, wooded with birches, not very big ones. The ground on the right bank rolls slowly upward from the top of the gorge to a crest just over which stands Farquhar’s cottage. It must be nearly two miles from where I stand. I have never been there, though of course now I know all about it. I wonder for a moment if the cottage is like what I imagine it to be.
    It is the last place on earth I want to visit. So much so that I feel I have overcome something even in coming so far. It makes me feel stronger. I