He caught her, and dragged her back to the middle of the yard. The sun’s edge began to show above the horizon, and everyone started to sing a hymn. My father held Sophie with one arm just as he had held the struggling calf. He raised his other hand high, and as he swept it down the knife flashed in the light of the rising sun, just as it had flashed when he cut the calf’s throat….
If John and Mary Wender had been there when I woke up struggling and crying, and then lay in the dark trying to convince myself that the terrible picture was nothing more than a dream, they would, I think, have felt quite a lot easier in their minds.
This was a time when I passed out of a placid period into one where things kept on happening. There wasn’t much reason about it; that is to say, only a few of the things were connected with one another: it was more as if an active cycle had set in, just as a spell of different weather might come along.
My meeting with Sophie was, I suppose, the first incident; the next was that Uncle Axel found out about me and my half-cousin, Rosalind Morton. He — and it was lucky it was he, and no one else — happened to come upon me when I was talking to her.
It must have been a self-preserving instinct which had made us keep the thing to ourselves, for we’d no active feeling of danger - I had so little, in fact, that when Uncle Axel found me sitting behind a rick chatting apparently to myself, I made very little effort to dissemble. He may have been there a minute or more before I became aware of somebody just round the corner of my eye, and turned to see who it was.
My Uncle Axel was a tall man, neither thin nor fat, but sturdy, and with a seasoned look to him. I used to think when I watched him at work that his weathered hands and forearms had some sort of kinship with the polished wood of the helves they used. He was standing in his customary way, with much of his weight upon the thick stick he used because his leg had been wrongly set when it was broken at sea. His bushy eyebrows, a little touched with grey, were drawn closer by a half-frown, but the lines on his tanned face were half-amused as he regarded me.
‘Well, Davie boy, and who would you be chattering away so hard to? Is it fairies, or gnomes, or only the rabbits?’ he asked.
I just shook my head. He limped closer, and sat down beside me, chewing on a stalk of grass from the rick.
‘Feeling lonely?’ he inquired.
‘No,’ I told him.
He frowned a bit again. ‘Wouldn’t it be more fun to do your chattering with some of the other kids?’ he suggested. ‘More interesting than just sitting and talking to yourself?’
I hesitated, and then because he was Uncle Axel and my best friend among the grown-ups, I said:
‘But I was.’
‘Was what?’ he asked, puzzled.
‘Talking to one of them,’ I told him.
He frowned, and went on looking puzzled.
‘Who?’
‘Rosalind,’ I told him.
He paused a bit, looking at me harder.
‘H’mm — I didn’t see her around,’ he remarked.
‘Oh, she isn’t here. She’s at home — at least, she’s near home, in a little secret tree-house her brothers built in the spinney,’ I explained. ‘It’s a favourite place of hers.’
He was not able to understand what I meant at first. He kept on talking as though it were a make-believe game; but after I had tried for some time to explain he sat quiet, watching my face as I talked, and presently his expression became very serious. After I’d stopped he said nothing for a minute or two, then he asked:
‘This isn’t play-stuff — it’s the real truth you’re telling me, Davie boy?’ And he looked at me hard and steadily as he spoke.
‘Yes, Uncle Axel, of course,’ I assured him.
‘And you never told anyone else — nobody at all?’
‘No. It’s a secret,’ I told him, and he looked relieved.
He threw away the remains of his grass-stalk, and pulled another out of the rick. After he had thoughtfully bitten a few pieces off that and spat them out he looked directly at me again.
‘Davie,’ he said, ‘I want you to make me a promise.’
‘Yes, Uncle Axel?’
‘It’s this,’ he said, speaking very seriously. ‘I want you to keep it secret. I want you to promise that you will never, never tell anyone else what you have just told me — never. It’s very important: later on you’ll understand better how important it is. You mustn’t do anything that would even let anyone guess about it. Will you promise me that?’
His gravity impressed me greatly. I had never known him to speak with so much intensity. It made me aware, when I gave my promise, that I was vowing something more important than I could understand. He kept his eyes on mine as I spoke, and then nodded, satisfied that I meant it. We shook hands on the agreement. Then he said:
‘It would be best if you could forget it altogether.’
I thought that over, and then shook my head.
‘I don’t think I could, Uncle Axel. Not really. I mean, it just is. It’d be like trying to forget—’ I broke off, unable to express what I wanted to.
‘Like trying to forget how to talk, or how to hear, perhaps?’ he suggested.
‘Rather like that — only different,’ I admitted.
He nodded, and thought again.
‘You hear the words inside your head?’ he asked.
‘Well, not exactly “hear”, and not exactly “see”,’ I told him. ‘There are — well, sort of shapes — and if you use words you make them clearer so that they’re easier to understand.’
‘But you don’t have to use words — not say them out loud as you were doing just now?’
‘Oh, no — it just helps to make it clearer sometimes.’
‘It also helps to make things a lot more dangerous, for both of you. I want you to make another promise — that you’ll never do it out loud any more.’
‘All right, Uncle Axel,’ I agreed again.
‘You’ll understand when you’re older how important it is,’ he told me, and then he went on to insist that I should get Rosalind to make the same promises. I did not tell him anything about the others because he seemed so worried already, but I decided I’d get them to promise, too. At the end he put out his hand again, and once more we swore secrecy very solemnly.
I put the matter to Rosalind and the others the same evening. It crystallized a feeling that was in all of us. I don’t suppose that there was a single one of us who had not at some time made a slip or two and brought upon himself, or herself, an odd, suspicious look. A few of these looks had been warnings enough to each; it was such looks, not comprehended, but clear enough as signs of disapproval just below the verge of suspicion, that had kept us out of trouble. There had been no acknowledged, co-operative policy among us. It was simply as individuals that we had all taken the same self-protective, secretive course. But now, out of Uncle Axel’s anxious insistence on my promise, the feeling of a threat was strengthened. It was still shapeless to us, but it was more real. Furthermore, in trying to convey Uncle Axel’s seriousness to them I must have stirred up an uneasiness that was in all their minds, for there was no dissent. They made the promise willingly; eagerly, in fact, as though it was a burden they were relieved to share. It was our first act as a group; it made us a group by its formal admission of our responsibilities towards one another. It changed our lives by marking our first step in corporate self-preservation, though we understood little of that at the time. What seemed most important just then was the feeling of sharing…
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