It
was a windy, noisy evening last night! I
awoke at 3:40 in the morning, a bit too warm, took off my shirt. I heard a lot of commotion out in the street,
as if a bus were loading. I got out of
bed and walked to the window. I looked
out onto High Street and couldn't see anything, though I didn't open the window
and couldn't see the sidewalk below. The
wind was really whipping around the corner at times, rattling the heavy
windows. I lay back down and tried to go
back to sleep, but sleep did not come.
The
thought began to dawn on me that perhaps I had been mugged by Mr. Hyde! My imagination began to speculate
further. Perhaps there weren't any
people on the street below, perhaps they were the ghosts of all the inhabitants
on that street (I had just read of the Porteus lynching, and we have been
steeped in local history for the past three days). Perhaps I was hearing the sounds of the
street merchants or perhaps the children playing on a Sunday in days very much
gone by.
The
thoughts kept me awake for awhile, not because I was fearful, more because I
was trying to determine the possibility of what I imagined being true. The ideas, twin, Hyde and ghosts, had caught
my fancy. I had been encouraging Cathy,
trying to talk her into taking the ghost tour in the evening.
A
little later I began to think of how to stop the window from rattling. A match book jammed in between the bottom window
and the window frame might work, but we didn't have one. I was too tired, anyway, to get out of bed
again. I had checked on it once already,
the children did not seem to be bothered, though Cathy had awakened once. Finally the idea came to me to fold up a
piece of newspaper and wedge it into the cracks, and as we had plenty of
newspapers handy, and the intermittent rattling was driving me crazy, I got up
and wedged the paper in the cracks. I
looked again onto the brightly lit street, but still could not see anyone
making the noise. Gradually, however,
the noises, though not the howl of the wind, seemed to die down and, with the
window rattle fixed, I fell asleep, thinking again on the strange case for Mr.
Hyde.
The
next morning two things happened that bestowed on my idea a peculiar sense of
reality in spite of the reasoned argument against it. The radio awakened me at 7:30 and not very
long afterward the prayer for the day came on.
It was about a professor who had had the most terrifying experience of
his life in Scotland, climbing down from a mountain in the mist and hearing his
footsteps in the snow echoed by a sound of other footsteps, following his,
taking steps twice as long. Perhaps it
was the dreaded X monster (I've forgotten its name). Apparently there is legend of something like
the abominable snowman on this particular mountain. The author of the prayer for the day spoke of
the reality of the fears within us: can they happen? Can they somehow exist outside of us?
Did
it happen to me, I wondered? But then,
how had I been able to raise goose eggs on my own head? A hallucination? A big black man on a street, just the two of
us alone was one thing, even him looking at me afterwards and grunting were in
the same vein: hallucination was certainly possible, but the head clobbering
and the goose eggs? It was like I was
smothered in arms: Medusa-like snakes attacking their own head? It seemed a little too strong for
hallucination. Surely I was not able to
create a force outside myself? But then,
anything was possible, wasn't it?
The
speaker went on to discuss how Jesus could recognize these fears within us and
spoke to them.
After
listening to the prayer of the day, I showered and shaved and got ready for
breakfast. After I dressed, the phone
rang and it was the constable again, asking me to look at a few more
pictures. He came up, and although I did
see two pictures which could have been my fellow, it was not a positive ID and
he left, saying the case would be kept in the computer, but closed unless
something else came up. Before leaving,
however, he made a comment which played directly into my imagination. He said, "As I said the other night,
when your wife was asking whether it's safe to walk, this is the first incident
like this we've heard of in Edinburgh.
I've checked with CID and
they've looked through their records and we find no records of a similar
occurrence."
I
told him of my thought that perhaps I had been attacked by Mr. Hyde. The complete Edinburgh experience, I
joked. He just laughed.
4:45
p.m. Dark outside, though the sky is
still a bit blue, not black. About all
we did today was visit the lovely Scottish National Gallery atop the Princess
Street Gardens (the Greek looking one).
We were treated to the Turner exhibition which only comes out in
January. The rest of the year the
watercolors are tucked away, out of the light, in accordance with the
instructions in Mr. Vaughan's will, so as to preserve the color and the
brightness of the paintings. They really
are beautiful - the blues are simply a wonder!
Before we left, I bought a bust of Homer and a crystal bud vase to put
on my desk.
The
bottom galleries have immense Italian paintings, along with some Dutch
works. The Scottish paintings are in the
basement. There was an especially good
one that nicely captured the light and shadows on the side of the mountain. I could almost see the shadows and sunlight
moving across the mountainside.
Before
I left I went up to the Impressionists gallery.
This follows our viewing two weeks ago at the Hayward Gallery of the
Tolouse Lautrec show. I couldn't help
but feel disappointed, especially today, as I shifted from biblical stories and
myths to the ordinary subjects of the Impressionists, as if the art, now prettier,
had lost an extra dimension, that of the story, in treating as its new subject
the ordinary lives of men and women.
Ordinary people were always in the paintings before, as were the
landscapes, but they were backdrops to the more important subjects of the
stories themselves, whether it was the Holy Family or Jupiter and Venus.
So
I have solved something for myself: Above all I like the stories, the picture
is just a means to that end.
Wednesday
8 January. 9 a.m. train, Edinburgh to
Peterborough. 12:56 p.m. train,
Peterborough to Cambridge. Home at 3
p.m. Sunrise in London: 8:04; Sunset
4:11.
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| Two Gentlemen |
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| Waiting to Leave in the Early Morning Darkness |
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| The Train Home |
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