The Shadow by Neil M. Gunn Read Free Book Online

make it stick just a little. The pew had no doubt been newly varnished. This was an interesting game during the interminable sermon and probably I sat fairly still for a long time with my own thoughts. Besides, I had on a new frock and that is something you just can’t forget. You have to live up to it. With a new frock you are the little lady, you have responsibilities. Wonderful, isn’t it? And then the sermon was over, I got my feet on the floor—and the frock stuck to the seat! It came away with a faint tear—and the colour of the varnished wood was brown in my mind.
    The doors and the mantelpieces and the skirtings and the cupboards are all pitch pine, but Aunt Phemie has wallpaper and carpets that tone with, it, taking away the grim bareness and giving quite an impression of warmth. And some of the bedroom doors, inside, are painted cream, with fittings to match. My bedroom has two windows, one to the south looking across the valley, and the other in the west wall through which I can see the steading and, beyond, the tops of spruce trees that are still in the grey evening and quite translated in the moonlight as if the earth had its own mute Christmas trees, and between and beyond them, very far away, a glimpse of blue mountain tops—real tops, like cones, not the great flat squatting mountains beyond the hill burn. There is so much sun in this bedroom that I love it. When I come into it I feel lifted up. I cannot tell you how real a feeling this is. Of course the room is lifted up in a way. I mean, you see over the valley and far away. It’s like being up in the air, on a tree. Perhaps that delicious childhood feeling? If ever I have a house of my own, I should like it to be on a slope, facing south. Never on a flat. Perhaps it was just poverty that sent all the lovable philosophers to the roofs so that their thoughts could fly away past the myriads of chimney pots. Blessed poverty! And dear Ranald!
    Do you mind my writing to you all this? But I’m not really asking because of course I’ve decided I’ll only send you what I think is good for you! Aunt Phemie thinks I come up to write letters, or read, and every afternoon—she is imperative about this—to rest for an hour in bed. She thinks this treatment is doing me great good because sometimes—when happiness has come to me all in a moment from writing to you—I bolt downstairs to worry her. (I bolted after the end of the last paragraph—after writing the haunting and distinguished word Ranald.) Anyway, I always come up here to write to you. I could not do it anywhere else.
    This is a room of my own. And another astonishing thing about writing you is this. Most times the writing just flows from me. Thoughts teem in my head, each one touching off a hundred others, and if I could get them down fast enough it would be a spate. This is bewildering to me at times, in a wild sort of amazing way, because I once tried to write, seriously, to make a living, as you know. Then I laboured. How I laboured! And what came was dead. I had bits, but when I got them together they were dead. I perfectly understood why editors returned the poor things. The made-up toys that won’t go. Children are impatient with them—except maybe the odd child who thinks they look sad. You’ll always find that odd one. Perhaps he’s the saviour.
    My saviour was The Last Word. The word the woman has—in fashion and the arts. Aunt Phemie loves the brilliant illustrations and thinks I must be very clever to hold down a job on the staff. What really astonishes her is how the affair comes out every month all new and fresh as paint. “Wizard” is no slang of yesteryear to her.
    Aunt Phemie is really a remarkable woman. Let me describe her to you (for I feel well to-day and won’t allow any horrid thought within arm’s length). But first let me dispel a nagging notion, raised a moment ago. I agree that this isn’t