I left him and stood at the door of our house before going in. I felt that something strange was about to happen, as if some disturbance was about to take place. Another plane crossed the sky and I stared up at it. It looked free and glittering in the sky, a quaint insect that buzzed up there by itself.
‘Why aren’t you coming in?’ said my mother.
‘I’m coming,’ I shouted back, and as I shouted a dog barked.
I felt obscurely that the village would never be the same again, and it seemed to me that the standing stones which stood out in silhouette against the sky a mile behind our house had moved in the gathering twilight, with a stony purposeful motion.
‘I’m coming,’ I shouted again.
I went in and my mother arose from the table at which she had been sitting. She suddenly looked helpless and old and I thought she had been crying. ‘Bloody Germans,’ I thought viciously.
Suddenly my mother clutched me desperately in her arms and said, ‘You’ll have to carry on with your studying just the same.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
I trembled in her arms like the needle on a gauge. I was rocking in her arms like a ship in the waves. Ahead of me through the window I could see the red sun setting like a cannon ball.
The Painter
We only once had a painter in our village in all the time that I can remember. His name was William Murray and he had always been a sickly, delicate, rather beautiful boy who was the only son of a widow. Ever since he was a child he had been painting or drawing because of some secret compulsion and the villagers had always encouraged him. He used to paint scenes of the village at harvest time when we were all scything the corn, or cutting it with sickles, and there is no doubt that the canvas had a fine golden sheen with a light such as we had never seen before. At other times he would make pictures of the village in the winter when there was a lot of snow on the moor and the hills and it was climbing up the sides of the houses so that there was in the painting a calm fairytale atmosphere. He would paint our dogs – who were nearly all collies – with great fidelity to nature, and once he did a particularly faithful picture of a sheep which had been found out on the moor with its eyes eaten by a crow. He also did paintings of the children dressed in their gay flowery clothes, and once he did a strange picture of an empty sack of flour which hung in the air like a spook.
We all liked him in those days and bought some of his pictures for small sums of money since his mother was poor. We felt a certain responsibility towards him also since he was sickly, and many maintained that he wouldn’t live very long, as he was so clever. So our houses were decorated with his colourful paintings and if any stranger came to the village we always pointed to the paintings with great pride and mentioned the painter as one of our greatest assets. No other village that we knew of had a painter at all, not even an adult painter, and we had a wonderful artist who was also very young. It is true that once or twice he made us uncomfortable for he insisted on painting things as they were, and he made our village less glamorous on the whole than we would have liked it to appear. Our houses weren’t as narrow and crooked as he made them seem in his paintings, nor did our villagers look so spindly and thin. Nor was our cemetery, for instance, so confused and weird. And certainly it wasn’t in the centre of the village as he had placed it.
He was a strange boy, seeming much older than his years. He hardly ever spoke and not because there was anything wrong with him but because it seemed as if there was nothing much that he wished to say. He dressed in a very slapdash manner and often had holes in the knees of his trousers, and paint all over his blouse. He would spend days trying to paint a particular house or old wall or the head of an old woman or old man. But as we had a lot of old people in the village, some who could play musical instruments – especially the melodeon – extremely well, he didn’t stand out as a queer person. There is, however, one incident that I shall always remember.
Our village of course was not a wholly harmonious place. It had its share of barbarism and violence. Sometimes people quarrelled about land and much less often about women. Once there was a prolonged controversy about a right of way. But the incident I was talking about happened like this. There was in the village a man called Red Roderick who had got his name because of his red hair. As is often the case with men with red hair he was also a man of fiery temper, as they say. He drank a lot and would often go uptown on Saturday nights and come home roaring drunk, and march about the village singing.
He was in fact a very good strong singer but less so when he was drunk. He spent most of his time either working on his croft or weaving in his shed and had a poor thin wife given to bouts of asthma whom he regularly beat
