Anyway, the night passed and the schoolmaster went home and I went to bed half thinking about the phrase ‘Wills will crash’ and pretty certain that the word should have been ‘clash’. Otherwise the whole thing didn’t make any sense and naturally I wanted it to make sense. After all that was what I was, a man who wanted to make sense of things. I slept a dreamless sleep but when I woke up in the morning I was still thinking of this saying. I am sure it would have passed smoothly into my mind leaving no trace if it hadn’t contained what I considered to be a semantic inexactitude. I worried at it but could make no further sense of it. I tried to find out more about the prophet’s sayings but could discover little about him, no more in fact than the schoolmaster had told me. As it was winter time I had time on my hands and pursued my investigations and came up with a blank. It was at this point that the idea came to me, as Relativity must have come to Einstein.
2
It was really a blindingly simple idea and I wondered why no one had thought of such a thing before. Maybe (I half considered) I had been sent to this place in order to arrive at the stunning conception I had now arrived at. Maybe I was predestined to meet the schoolmaster . . . At that time you see I had no idea of the intricacies that would enmesh me. Anyway my idea was this. Why didn’t I raise the wood at the corner (that is, raise a shed there) and see what would happen? There was no reason why I couldn’t do it if I wanted to. I had plenty of money. There were one or two unemployed people who would build the shed for me. I had no fears that permission would be refused me as I was quite popular and not thought of as an outsider. I reviewed my idea from all angles and there seemed nothing against it. It would give me an interest during the winter months and it would return me to a psychological or at least philosophical theme. I may say that as I have mentioned already I had no feeling for ghosts, spirits, stars, etc., at that time, and thought them easily explicable manifestations of the fallible human psyche.
Anyway, not to be too tedious about the business, I decided to build a wooden shed at the Corner. I had no doubt that this was the location mentioned since I gathered that the place had been so-called from time immemorial. I got hold of a middle-aged fellow called Buckie who was a builder but unemployed at the time. As he had a large family which consisted mostly of teenage girls who shrieked and screamed and presumably ate a lot, like seagulls, he was very glad to help me. The hut was to be fairly spacious. Buckie reported every morning in his blue overalls with his rule in his pocket and began to work on the fine new yellow wood. I often used to watch him but as he didn’t say much at any time I ended by leaving him alone. He didn’t even ask me why I wanted the shed built. Perhaps he thought I wanted a place where I could be absolutely quiet or perhaps he thought I intended to get some stuff which I would store there eventually.
In any case one fine day I went to the Corner and found that the shed had been built. As green is my favourite colour I decided to paint it green and this I did myself. For the rest it was a fairly spacious shed with two windows and one door. It was fairly warm inside but not too warm and there was plenty of room. The windows were quite large and looked out on to the road which travelled past the hut towards the town eight miles away. After the hut was finished I would go and sit there. I took a chair and table and I would read and so some writing. Otherwise I didn’t use it much.
At nights I would lie awake and wonder why I had been so stupid as to build it. There it pointlessly stood for no reason that I or anyone else could offer. I had no clue as to what I was going to do with it. I couldn’t offer it to anyone else, not even as a place for staying in, for no one would have made their home there as there was a tradition that there were ghosts at the Corner and the villagers were very superstitious. Thus the days passed and I waited. I had built the hut and the next move was up to the prophet, if there was to be any next move. Sometimes I felt like a girl waiting to be visited by a lover and impatient that he wasn’t coming. If he had any sincerity or love why didn’t he prove by his presence that his words were true?
Naturally some of the villagers asked me why I had built the hut and I told them some vague story about wanting a quiet place to study in. They seemed quite satisfied with this explanation as though I mixed with them, they didn’t make any pretence of understanding me.
Then on a lovely spring evening the first move was made. There was a knock at the door and standing there was a young boy from the village whose name was John Macleod. He was
