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

agreed that hard-working parents expect their daughter in such circumstances to do some repaying; otherwise the education would have been wasted. We saluted such wisdom with gratitude; we shook with mirth.
    Actually farm people did very well out of the first Great War. Dan, her schoolboy admirer, was the same age as Phemie and old enough to have spent the two years from over seventeen to nineteen in actual fighting. He could have been exempted from fighting, for he was now indispensable on the farm, but instead he gave his age as eighteen. By this time he must definitely have concluded he had lost Phemie.
    Does all this bore you? But what an amount of good it’s doing me! I can almost think of the policeman now. And I’m waiting for him. With Aunt Phemie and Dan behind me, I gather strength where it’s needed. Dan wrote her some letters. How I should love to see them! I suspect there was very little in them and certainly, I should say, no declaration. I know she has them tied away somewhere. Not that she definitely said so. A sparseness, an economy, in all this that toughens the last fibre of the heart. Bless them for evermore.
    She became a schoolmistress in a southern town. She liked her work with the children and began to take an interest in the child mind and “advanced” systems of teaching. She went abroad during the summer vacation. Our Aunt Phemie was really becoming a very civilised creature. As a little girl, I was absolutely fascinated by her. Finally, it was to her that I owe the Art School and my “freedom”.
    The years roll on. Aunt Phemie became thirty-three. She is at home and it is summer. It is, in fact, the night before she is due to leave. It’s as casual as that. She had seen Dan off and on, in the years. He ran his farm now and ran it successfully; interested in all the latest improvements and going ahead. She went out for a walk by herself,just to have a last look around the old place, for the following year she was going abroad to an educational conference. By chance, she ran into Dan. He was scything some bracken by a little wood in order to prove to himself how many cuttings of the young shoot were needed to kill that ravenous weed. He explained the idea to her; it made conversation easy. (I wish you could have seen the smile in Aunt Phemie’s eyes as she explained it to me.) At last she is taking leave of him. He looks at her and does not put out his hand. His fists are gripping the handles of the scythe again anyway. When a person like that looks right into your eyes it takes the strength out . of you; your wits fly away like startled pigeons. At least I must assume as much, for when he said, You’re not going back, are you? she didn’t know what on earth to answer. Then he said, Are you Phemie? And she heard her voice answer, No. I asked her what happened to the scythe. She looked startled for a moment, then she smiled saying she had no idea.
    I can’t go on, Ranald. However lightly I try to write about it, the tragedy of Dan’s awful death comes looming upon me. And then when Aunt Phemie came out of the hospital, alone now as she had never been and within the scene of the appalling accident, how she could decide to stay on is something I can only grope towards.
    She was a great comfort to me when I came home after saying No to the policeman. I was terribly shaken. She gave me some brandy. I felt sick inside as if my vitals were melting down. I know the trick of holding on, but oh, sometimes the stitches, the threads, keeping you together grow so thin and rotten. But when I cried, Why did I say No to the policeman? Aunt Phemie answered that that was perfectly natural and that she would have said the same herself. At once that awful question, which had kept crying in me down the fields, was eased of urgency—as if it had been properly answered. Of course I knew it had not been answered, but that now made no difference. Don’t ask me to