The Shadow Read Online Free Page A

tone of her voice—cried harshly, piercingly. But there was no need for her to be so anxious. She knew that, of course. She was teaching her offspring, warning it, pointing to the freedom of the sky. Old man father, far to the left, had a keen eye and would rather have sailed right off. But mother was full of bother, for she looked on these fields as her own, her home.
    I left the mound and came down to the edge of the clearing in the wood. And then something happened that has stuck most vividly in my mind. It will sound ridiculous as I tell it to you, but you won’t mind that. (I realise all in a heap how dreadful it would be if I could not tell you the silly things—the small change that buys the little extras with the groceries. But I shut my mind against that, and the bombed flat, and the awful black abyss of estrangement that opened between us, that valley of nightmare wherein I was broken. … Ran, Ran, I keep telling myself they are no more.) I stepped out on the clearing and at once the boggy ground stung with its wetness. Drawing back, I stood as a small tree in front of the other trees, like a schoolgirl who had pushed her way through to the front of the audience. And the brightness of that open space was indeed like a stage where something was going to happen. I waited. Nothing happened—and the curtain came down in a rush! That’s what happened. And it took my breath away, it was so completely realistic, the very perfection of a “quick curtain”. It did take me a few moments to realise that one of the great, sailing clouds had crossed the sun! I wish you could have seen your own face laughing, as I saw it. It would have done you good. It did me a lot. Then up went the curtain just as quickly and the invisible play went on.
    The brightness went with me. It ran before me on my own quick feet, while I walked slowly and—I hope—becomingly. Oh, Ran! the gift of such a moment between us, the lightness and brightness, and the swift-tumbling shadow-darkness of the curtains! For that shadow-darkness was itself as exciting and full of life as the light. Entrances and exits an’ all. I do love you.
    So at last I was on the moor. But I won’t tell you about that. Too many things. I don’t know how it is that I run on so. Things that I never noticed before—or hardly—have now a life of their own and are full of an exquisite significance. That last word is too, too heavy. Do you think it is because the final curtain so very nearly rang down on me—and so narrow a reprieve does something to the eyes? Anyway, it’s done it! When you crashed—but I won’t ask. I see you going through the future shadows of the world, crying Never again! Oh, I know why you go. I am with you. I am far from you at the moment. It is as if—I had come out on the other side. Please do not be impatient about that. For, Ran! Ran! I know—though I cannot tell you yet—what there could be on the other side. And I’m afraid, Ran, of those who think and think only. That’s a foolish way to put it. We need efficiency, we need certainty, we need thought more than anything. Scientific analysis and construction. Yes, yes, yes. If only we could also keep our eyes real eyes. What happened when the schoolmaster with the thistledown eyes looked? Horror rose—and shook—and died, and what they looked on, withered.
    Why had I to think of him again? Where did he come from? What does he mean? But I’m not going to be psychoanalysed. Not on your life! Simply a delusion or illusion of convalescence. You can even say I’m being hallucinated though I’d hate you if you did, not because it may not be true—what does that matter?—but because of an awful smugness in the voice of the analyst!
    Now I’ve fought back to the moor again, to freedom. And oh, Ran!—this will annoy you—how awfully smug is our Party’s definition of freedom as