The Shadow Read Online Free

non-intellectual. Messy. Like an ingrowing toe-nail in a foot that could do with washing. Disgusting. It’s subjective. Horrors! Sweep it away, away into the dustbin, and leave life cleansed and sweet as a schoolmaster’s equation. We can then proceed to reform society, at least to get out of our present mess.
    If I could draw really well, I’d put all an intellectual’s intellectuality in his nose. It almost embarrasses me to add that you have a very distinguished nose. At the moment, mine (I have just had a look at it) is not very distinguished. Inward. That’s what we think of emotion. But, oh, Ran! Ran! yesterday it was outward. Are you listening to me? It was outward. It raced over the moor. It raced over the sky. The clouds and the blue. Light. Sunlight. The sudden snipe from the bog. The lark. Life. It was life, pure lovely life, and the beating of the heart was the beating of wings. A beating and a singing. The passionate certainty that this was life, that we are stifling it, losing it. Oh, Ran! I told you! I cried to you!
    I fall down after that effort. For I’ll do anything, say anything, rather than look—at that figure. What made me use the word schoolmaster a little ago? Where has he come from? Who evoked him and gave him the right—to wait by my side with this merciless, appalling patience? He is about forty-five, tall, well-fleshed, straight. His hair is brushed flat, especially along the side of the head, past‘the ears. I know that, without having looked at him. My hand trembles. I can hardly write. Please, Ranald, forgive me these two blots on the paper. They prove I’m messy. I know. They don’t look like pearls now. To think he is a creation of my own! From where? Where?
    I’ll have to look at him and get it over. For you know why I’m afraid to look. His awful eyes. I hang on to the pen. I keep on trying to move it, to make it go. I’m trying to speak quietly to you, Ranald. Each eyeball is a ball of thistledown. A grey ball of staring thistledown. I can see them, without looking. But I’ll have to look. I’m going—to look—now———
    In the wood there is a clearing, an open space like a fair-sized field. It is rather boggy, with tall grasses and tall wild flowers (pale purple scabious take over from rose-pink ragged robin). Also in the wood there is a mound, where the sunlight does not sleep but everywhere has its eyes open. You can’t see those entrancing eyes. You see by them. The trees stand around and the bushes (juniper) squat lazily here and there. It’s the quietest, loveliest place, full of goodness. Really, Ranald, it is. It’s all health together and the young rabbits’ ears are—I was going to say as pink as shells, but that would be silly for no shell can glow right through as these ears do. But to-day (that is, the day I got there after the storm of thistledown in the field below, for I’m still on that day. I must learn to be methodical) the wind was blowing as I told you, and the trees were dancing like waves of the sea. Throwing their arms about, tossing high their crests, and the sounds they made were the sounds of waves on a strand, but without the pounding beat. And it was warm and sheltered.
    The buzzards had followed me. They were mewing, high up, one away to the right and one to the left—the parent birds. They were being ridiculously anxious about their young one. The young one had kept well behind and about midway between them. Like three far-separated kites they were, hanging on the wind. Now and then, as I approached the wood, the young one would fall away in a circle. Actually it did fall lower as it went with the wind, but immediately it came round into the wind it rose again. Once I heard it cry. I knew exactly what it was feeling and smiled. These enormous aerial spaces and the high wind were a little new to it. The mother, away on the right—I knew her by the