The Goose Girl and Other Stories (26 page)

Rory undressed, and tidily put all his prison clothes into a green, wicker-work laundry basket that stood in a corner of the corridor between the bedroom and the bathroom. He looked for a razor, and in the drawer of a dressing-table found a new Gillette in the fancy wrapping designed for Christmas presents: the minister was evidently a thrifty soul, and made no use of presents till he needed them. So Rory washed and shaved himself, in cold water, and dressed anew in the underclothes and shirt he had taken from the draper's van, and the coat and trousers he had found in the mahogany wardrobe. A boot-cupboard gave him a pair of shabby, uncleaned brogues, and in the kitchen, in a bread bin, there was the discarded half of a stale loaf. Half of that, with a tin of sardines, made his supper, and the remnant crust, with another tin, he put in his pocket. He went out through the kitchen window well-fed, decently clad, clean-chinned, and exuberantly intent on the revenge that now seemed little more than arm's length away.

He made another reconnaissance—he prowled, that is, in the darkness of the village, a darkness broken by the primrose-yellow ports of lighted rooms—and outside the schoolhouse found a lady's bicycle. The schoolmaster, a widower, had a visitor that evening: the teacher of a lesser establishment, some miles away, who at the age of thirty-two felt a growing doubt of her vocation. When she discovered that her bicycle had been stolen, she quickly realised that the hand of providence was working for her, and declared her intention of staying the night. The widower nervously consented, the lady ruthlessly exploited her advantage, and when the hand of providence put out the light, Rory, under the lesser darkness of the sky, was pedalling towards the west.

The heat of his desire gave him strength, and kept weariness at bay. But instinct that had grown up with him in the deer-forest, and been developed by service in a commando, kept him alert and wary: twenty times he stopped and lay in a ditch to avoid the lights of a motor-car, and once, near a cross-roads, he saw the car that had overtaken him stopped by policemen, and heard its driver being questioned. Carrying his bicycle he made a detour through the fields, and drove on.

When the pink and pearl of dawn were in the sky he was on the coast road that leads to Inverness, and no more than a few miles from the cluttered little town that is called the capital of the Highlands. To his right lay the silver-pointed firth, and beyond it the broken cliffs of a many-coloured, pleasant land with a background of blue mountains
head-veiled in shining clouds. But Big Rory, though recognising the beauty of the scene, gave it little thought. What pleased him more was the realisation that now he was coming to familiar ground; but before he reached it he had to pass the dangers of Inverness and its close tangle of streets.

He decided, perhaps unwisely, that a lady's bicycle would make him conspicuous, so presently he threw it behind a dyke and walked into the town. He went quickly but watchfully. At that hour in the morning there were few people about, and the policeman who, having got up too early, was sauntering to his duty, could hardly help noticing him. For Rory was a tall, outstanding figure of a man, even without a lady's bicycle for decoration. The policeman stared, and Rory, turning left at the first corner, ran like a hare to the next, and there, correctly judging the policeman's reaction, ran forwards, in his direction, and turned right again to the main street. Leaning thin as a shadow against a shop-front, he peered round and saw a clear coast. He doubled across, and came into the station square. A bus was moving slowly, he sprinted and caught it, and settled down a little out of breath but comfortably aware that he could afford to buy a ticket. In the deserted manse he had found, in a kitchen cupboard, a domestic savings bank: a whisky bottle half-full of sixpences. He had transferred this useful hoard to his trouser-pockets, and felt comfortably well-off.

The bus was going north, to Beauly, Dingwall, Tain and Bonar Bridge, by the seaside road that skirts the three long, lovely land-invading firths of the eastern Highlands—the Beauly, Cromarty, and Dornoch firths—but now Rory More knew where he was, and to be going a few miles out of his way did not perturb him. His sense of purpose, indeed—his earnest mission of revenge—was stiffened by the journey, for the bus was taking him towards the country where for six long months he had toiled to make money enough to marry his false, fair-skinned, close-kissing, steep-breasted Katie with her sleek black hair ....

That was three years before; and he had been warned against her, as she had been warned against him. He remembered what he had been told, but remembered more clearly his first sight of her when he came home from his knockabout, wandering labour, gambling, and dissipation at the other end of the world. Mount Isa and a sheep-run at Longreach, a cattle-station on the Gulf of Carpentaria and a pearling-schooner working from Thursday Island, a rough spell as a policeman in Sydney—that was what he had gone to after three years in the army, and when he came home again, to the island,
Katie was almost the first girl he saw, and he fell in love with her as suddenly, uncontrollably, and precipitously as a boy toboganning down a snow-clad hill.

They had warned him against her, they had warned her against him. And all their warnings had leapt off his consciousness and hers as lightly as an April storm of hail from a thick, impenetrable roof of Highland slate. Both wild, untrustworthy, unpredictable, they had foundered in a gulf of love from which, as they thought, they would never escape nor could forget the compulsion of each other's lips and hands. Marriage—the long, close imprisonment of marriage—was their only destiny, and to make their destiny viable, to give it house-money and buy furniture, he had taken employment with the Hydro-Electric Board that was harnessing, in a dozen places, the rainfall and the wild waters of the Highlands to turn rain and river, behind great dams, into power for industry; and paid high wages to the men who laboured for it.

He had gone to an encampment of labourers near the head of Glen Affric—a dozen miles from Beauly—and worked hard for half a year in the most dangerous places, in a tunnel through the hill, on the arching height of a dam, and quickly made his name as a bold and skilful man who could take command, when command was needed, and weld a gang of scruffy, indifferent, easy wage-earners into a purposive, hard-striving team. And on pay-nights he would strip them of the wages they had earned. He was an arrogant, cold gambler, and with the authority of his knowledge of far-distant places and the habits of the Antipodes, he persuaded his fellow-workers to play poker; and rooked them of their earnings. At the end of his six-months' work, after a week in which everyone had been paid extravagantly for overtime, he sat down to a game of poker that, by two o'clock in the morning, had won him £120. Then he announced, with hard assurance, his intention to stop. ‘For what I've won, put on top of what I've earned and saved, is about enough to let me get married in comfort, and to get married is what I want to do, and what I'm going to do.'

But he didn't get out of the game without a fight. There were those who had lost, and they, quite naturally, were unwilling to let the winner get away with his winnings. The biggest of the losers—both in respect of what he had lost and the size of his body—was an Irishman from Donegal; and he with a dubious, shifty-eyed coterie of fellow-countrymen stood between Rory More and the door. But Rory hit him in the guts, and brought him down to chopping-level, and hooked him between the eyes and opened a cut that bled like Niagara, and the man from Donegal sank back as if he were a dying
prima ballerina
into the waiting arms of his chorus, and Rory with a backward glance of triumph and precaution went out and packed his clothes.

A man named Hamilton, whom they called the Anarchist, followed him and said, ‘You might lend me a fiver.'

‘Why should I?' asked Rory.

‘You've plenty and I've nothing,' said the Anarchist.

‘It's a poor reason,' said Rory. ‘No one but a saint would listen to a reason like that.'

‘It's no reason at all,' said the Anarchist. ‘It's just an excuse.'

‘Well,' said Rory, ‘you're honest at least—'

‘Then make it ten,' said the Anarchist. ‘For there's damned few honest men in the world, and the rest of you can afford to pay us a living wage.'

So Rory gave him £10, and strapped his luggage to the back of the motor-bicycle he had bought, and drove away from the camp, through the long glen to the west. It was bright morning when he came to Kyle, and he should have taken the early ferry and crossed at once to the island. But in Kyle he met a man who had been his sergeant in the commando, and was now a lorry-driver working for the County Council. And the ex-sergeant said, ‘Damn the County Council! Let them drive their own lorries this morning, for you and me are going to have a drink together.'

They spent the morning drinking, and talking happily about their days in the army, and at mid-day Rory said, ‘It's time I went and got my breakfast.'

‘Damn your breakfast,' said the sergeant, ‘it's time for dinner, and God help the wife if she doesn't give us a good one.'

So Rory and the sergeant and the sergeant's wife had their dinner together, and Rory went over to the island on the ferry, and on the farther shore found a comfortable nook, where bracken grew among boulders under a couple of birches, and there lay down to sleep for an hour or two. He woke when the sun had westered beyond the mountain tops and the air was chilled by the coming of twilight, and re-mounting his motor-bicycle drove on. He went to Katie's house, whose mother was a widow, a timorous creature who was sorely taken aback to see him, and would not tell him where Katie was. She wasn't at home, and that was all her mother knew. She offered him a cup of tea, she proposed to boil him a duck-egg, or two if he wanted them, but Rory wouldn't stay. He went out, and on the village street a little dark-haired boy, with a questing nose and narrow cheek-bones, said to him, ‘If it's Katie you're looking for, you'll find her with Lachlan the grocer.'

‘With old Lachlan?' asked Rory.

‘That's where she is,' said the boy.

To Rory, who was a true Highlander, suspicion at once became certainty, and leaving his motor-bicycle where it leaned against a dyke he walked with a furious yet furtive speed to the trim villa that housed, in a gaily windowed ground-floor front, the village's most prosperous shop. Lachlan was a warm man, a wealthy man by island standards, but an old man too. Forty-three, perhaps forty-five, and a widower whose barren wife had died a couple of years before. How could Katie see in him anything desirable? In Lachlan, who was pale, pasty, fat and pious, a psalm-singing Presbyterian whose narrow faith was a ludicrous contrast to the spacious circumference of his waist? Oh, what could Katie see in him?

Money, said Rory, whose own pockets were bulging with the thick-paper notes of the Royal Bank of Scotland, the National Bank, the Commercial Bank, the Clydeside Bank, and several others. It's his money, thought Rory, that has seduced her, and with the certainty of seduction in his mind crept carefully as an Indian scout to the back-door of Lachlan's house, and peering through the slit of carelessly drawn curtains saw, in Lachlan's sitting-room, the very evidence—or, at the least, presumption—of seduction. For there, in a capacious chair, sat white-faced, puffy Lachlan, and on his plump lap was Katie—magnolia-white to his dough-pallor—and her arms were about his neck, her beseeching mouth was on his glistening fat cheek.

With a bellow of wrath Rory ran to the door, with a buffalo-heave of his shoulder burst it in, and confronted the flagrant couple with the burning denunciation of his wrath. Katie rose with a scream, and a back-hander across her mouth, a fore-hander to the magnolia-bloom of her cheek, sent her sprawling in a corner. Lachlan, quivering like a junket in the hands of a drunken cook, rose too, and was knocked down by a fearful right-hander that—as, in due course, a surgeon testified—fractured his lower jaw two inches beyond the chin. Rory picked him up again, and punched him in the nose, with an astonishing declaration of blood. Then he pulled Katie to her feet, and very roughly took from the third finger of her left hand the engagement ring he had given her, that she still wore. She resisted him, and being a strong girl whose momentary panic had now become a pugnacious opposition, the struggle was so severe that her finger was broken before Rory succeeded in detaching the ring; though he had no intention of so maiming her.

But Katie was now very angry—it was obvious that there was no
fight left in Lachlan—and with her good right hand she took a hideous and heavy china dog from the mantelpiece and threw it at Rory. She missed, and took the neighbouring dog from the other end of the mantelpiece. She missed again, but very nearly missed, and Rory, ill-advisedly, took off the top of a standard lamp—an oil lamp—and flung it at her. She nimble dodged, and the lamp, bursting against the wall, at once became the centre or core of a small but blazing fire.

‘Let it burn!' said Rory, ‘and I hope it will catch the black tinder of your hearts!'

With the engagement ring in his hand he went out and left them, and Katie and Lachlan, using cushions and the carpet, tried to smother the growing fire. Their fellow-villagers began to arrive, for the pinch-faced boy who had told Rory where Katie was to be found, had quickly told a dozen others that trouble could be looked for at Lachlan's house, for Rory was on his way to vengeance there; and the village had been quick to respond. More and more of them came, the fire was put out, and Donald, the village constable, a kindly man who hated trouble, said, ‘We ought to be looking for Rory, or he'll be getting up to more mischief.'

Donald and a few other men went out and quickly found Rory leaning against the little wooden privy at the bottom of the small back-garden. He had become quiet and disconsolate, and there was no fight left in him. He stood there, brooding and melancholy, and when the constable said, ‘If all that I've been told is true, Rory, I think I should take you into custody,' he answered, ‘Just as you please, Donald. Do whatever you please.'