The Shadow by Neil M. Gunn Page A

now really earnest. He takes out a silver cigarette case and offers: Have one—it will warm you up.
    I don’t smoke, thank you.
    Sound judge! I am trying to rid myself of the poison by degrees. It does things to your sight—and also—I think—to your vision. Have you ever smoked?
    Yes.
    And stopped it? Wait a minute. Please. I am dying for a spot of intelligent talk. And look! have you ever seen the little waterfall up round the bend of the burn—just yonder? Marvellous. And by the time you get there you’ll be as warm as a pie. Above it there’s an old cart road—actually the old cattle drovers’ road through the mountains—and you should see it for this reason. …
    Why did I go with him? I try to be honest. Had I not gone, I would have been left in an angry mess. I had got to finish with him, to know him, to let him see that I knew him, and so wipe him out of my mind. He was too closely connected with the policeman and the murder, the shadow. He had become part of what I was fighting. This must sound utterly irrational. It is. That’s the trouble. But it has for me an inescapable reality—like the reality in a dream. Only, this is no dream.
    He is an engaging companion. His moustache suits him, balances in some way the strong hair of his head brushed straight back, as if brushed with his palms on coming up from a dive. His brown eyes are intelligent and knowing. He is full of gleams of a refreshing animal intelligence. He knows things, the heath, the flowers, stops with an upthrust of eyebrow over a pale yellow saxifrage in a slit of rock, becomes for a moment utterly absorbed, then passes from it with a vivid quickness of eye. When he found a bit of alpine mouse-ear he, exaggeratedly calling it edelweiss, laughed with pleasure and began talking of the Alps, of the South of France. All this makes it easy for me. I find I can answer him quite impersonally, and strength begins to seep back. In fact I permit myself to wonder if he did actually see me bathing. Had he been an ordinary man, I would have said no, because I should have known from a hundred signs. But he is, I recognise, the man who could peep without feeling himself a peeping-Tom. And in some obscure way that has to do with my difficulties, this is dangerous.
    But it would take too long to tell everything, the talk and the look of things seen. The waterfall is a bonny place and would be very unexpected if you did not hear it long before you rounded the rock face with the small tree growing out of its brow. The pool is round and dark with a great slab of rock thrusting up from its tail like a rudder. The water chute is only about six or eight feet high and you can easily climb up round it on rock ledges. My instant delight in it was marred a little by finding his eyes waiting for my reaction. He wants to sit by the edge of the pool, but I climb up and sit on the top rock-ledge. He begins contrasting visible colours and I know he paints. I make a contrary suggestion about rock structure and at once he says: You paint? No, I reply coolly, why, do you? No, he answers, I’m a poet. There is something exaggerated and absurd about all this and suddenly he cries, throwing his arms up: Ah, thank God you can smile! He rushes into speech, telling me he has been trying to paint the falls in the gorge. His paraphernalia is down there now. When I am choked with my own poetry, he cries, I try to get rid of it in paint. This fills him with laughter. I know this kind of madness, have the incipient feeling of revulsion but control it, for knowledge of where you are does bring confidence. I feel I can deal with this fellow, have indeed a sudden vindictive wish to take it out of him. To stave off the personal, I ask him something about his treatment of the falls, and he says, looking at me: So you do paint? I reply that I don’t; I went through an Art School but that’s all. And I didn’t go through an Art School,