I arrived therefore in this village, in this country, the Highlands. I didn’t know very much of the Highlands when I came. Naturally I could appreciate its scenery, but scenery after all is only a reflection of the psyche. There were hills, lochs, rivers, broken fences and roads. It looked like a land to which much had been done, adversely. It looked a lonely land without sophistication or riches. It echoed with ghosts and waterfalls. It looked a broken land. And it suited me because that was what I was myself, a broken man. Quite literally, I was a signpost pointing nowhere. It wasn’t, I suppose, at all extraordinary that the Highlanders accepted me or at least didn’t show any hostility. I used to go out fishing and they would tell me the best bait. I was shown how to cut my own peats. I even used to tar and felt my own roof. All these things I learned from them. I imagine that what I was doing was using my psychological techniques so that they would like me. I took care not to offend them. The only thing was I never went to church but strangely enough they accepted that too on the grounds that a man must be loyal to his own church and since mine was presumably the Church of England I couldn’t be expected to betray it simply because I had put a number of miles between it and myself.
I studied these people and their history. I knew what had made them and what they had become. I recognised their secretiveness and the reason for it. I sensed the balance of forces which is necessary to keep a village together. I recognised the need for rivalry between villagers. I was dimly aware of the vast spaces of their past and how they must be occupied. I noticed the economic differentiation between men and women. I was aware of the hidden rancours and joys. After all I had been a psychologist. These things were child’s play to me. I learned their language and read their books and poems. I had plenty of time to read and I read a lot. The local schoolmaster came to visit me.
And this is what happened. Now I am ready to tell my story and I am sure that you must appreciate that it is a very odd one.
This schoolmaster was a very odd psychological type. He was immersed in his children, I mean his pupils. He believed that his ideal work, what he was destined for, was to be among them. He was really rather a child himself with his rosy face and his impermeable surfaces. I could see what had happened to him, but after all that is the terror with which a psychologist must live, to see the gestures and know their real value and weight and meaning, to track a joke to its stinking lair. The schoolmaster was in fact one of the few people I could really talk to on a certain level since he had in fact read a little though in no sense deeply. Still he was useful to me since he knew a great deal of the lore and literature of the people, though of course not profoundly, being himself still inside that lore.
One night we had a long discussion about predestination. It was disordered and random and without penetration. My mind had lost its edge and wandered vaguely round the edges of the real problem like someone who roams round a field at night. I knew that my mind had lost its edge and its conviction and it disturbed me. I knew that my mind was not powerful enough to make a proper analysis of such a concept though in relation to his it was in fact the mind of a giant. We drank much sherry since the schoolmaster would not drink whisky. I was sick of myself and only half listening when suddenly he said, ‘What do you think of this? Many years ago, in fact it must be over a hundred years ago, we had a prophet here who made some odd prophecies.’
‘And how many of them have come true?’ I said indifferently, purely automatically.
‘Well,’ he said, ‘it is rather difficult to say. They are set in such mysterious terms. For instance, he said that when the river ate the land stones would be raised. Some people think this refers to the storm of last year when that big wall was built.’
Mechanically, I said, ‘That could be expected, surely, in a place which gets so much rain as this. I wouldn’t place much reliance on that.’ And I poured myself another sherry.
Anyway he told me some more of his mysterious sayings but only one stayed in my mind. There is a reason for this which I did not see at the time but which will appear later.
This saying went something like this: ‘When the wood is raised at the corner then wills will crash.’
In my befuddled state I couldn’t make any sense of this, especially the last part. The first part could refer to a wooden building and the corner was a clear enough sign since there is a place at the end of the village called the Corner but as for the second part I was bemused. I said to him and I remember this clearly, ‘Surely that must really be “Wills will clash”, not “crash”.’
‘That’s how it has come down to us,’ he said looking at me. And that was that. I was sure that there had been an error in the manuscript or whatever
