The Shadow by Neil M. Gunn Read Free Book Online Page A

real writing, in any literary way. I’m not fancying myself, dear mind-piercing Ranald. Easy, facile. Very well. But if I had to write it, such as it is, as a literary composition, a creation, a work, it would make me sweat and would go dead. It’s because I’m writing to you. Do you understand, Ranald dear? Must I tell you that love is the wizard? Is that perhaps the ultimate secret of all great writing? And not only love of a person. Though always at the core, whether of a tree or a mountain (or a political world theory!), what man finds—or loses—is himself. That’s no new thought. But oh, how suddenly new to me!
    May I now proceed, please, with Aunt Phemie? Thank you. Aunt Phemie is not the stout comfortable motherly woman upon whose bosom you can lay your tired head. Such women are the hope and mainstay of the world. When analysis and logic founder in their own despair, the motherly woman abides. From her I see myriads of little feet running down the world in a bright green morning—while you half suspect me of malice! Let me tell you something I have found out. The clever-clever ones in our set affected to despise the comfortable motherly woman as a brainless cow. Actually—they hated her. Think that one out.
    Aunt Phemie wasn’t long a mother. She is comfortably slim and though well over forty the gold in her hair hasn’t faded much. I suppose gold doesn’t. She is a tirelessly energetic worker and yet can stand quite still. She is over the average height for women, in fact exactly my own height, for we measured; but when I tried something of mine on her it wouldn’t meet, and I’m no willow wand though a loss in weight produces the willowy sensation.
    She was a school teacher. You would never think so until, perhaps, you heard her discussing farm business with the grieve. For of course the farm is hers. When her husband was killed within a year of their marriage, she did not go back to teaching. Everyone thought she would sell out and go back, but she didn’t. I think she loved her husband. Not the wild first love of the poets, but the kind that grows unbeknownst, like a plant or a tree. The other day we were going over the garden and in one corner came on a young rowan, all of four feet, complete with fruit. She had never noticed it before. She was surprised that such a growth could have taken place without her noticing it. We laughed. It was a delightful moment.
    Like myself, she comes of farming stock, and at the country school the boy who one day became her husband always had an eye for her. Aunt Phemie does not open her heart, but she can smile and there is a humour in her smile that makes it the most charming self-contained thing you ever saw. Boys at country schools don’t wear their hearts on their sleeves. At a country school the profounder emotions are severely disciplined. To admit that you were courting someone—oh boy! There are fights enough in the usual way. A healthy healthy place. And possibly he was shy, because deep in him he was strong and sensitive.
    That was the early position and Aunt Phemie was clever. Anyway she was good at her lessons, got a bursary to the secondary school, and won another from there to the university.
    She has something—were it only her smile—and must with her red-gold locks have been attractive above the ordinary.
    Which meant swains. She enjoyed it all. She would; and must have been devastating because she is kind. You can be either haughty or kind. Being haughty is possibly the more devastating because it upsets man’s unconscious superiority! But kindness lingers. And Aunt Phemie can be kindly firm; which is not so far from being haughty, I suppose. She never actually became engaged. Don’t ask me why. It goes too deep. After my parents had spent all that money on my education it would have been a nice thing for me to have gone and got married, wouldn’t it? she said. I agreed. We also