The Goose Girl and Other Stories (28 page)

They were, at that moment, driving along the spectacular road which, from a great height, leans above the dark and melancholy waters of Loch Duich: a scene of romantic grandeur, of superb and sorrowful association, and of conspicuous danger—for the descent to the loch was precipitous—to anyone riding in a lorry loaded with two tons of gelignite. For the first time since his escape from prison, Rory felt a weakening of his purpose.

He was not unaccustomed to the use of gelignite. When he and his fellow-labourers were cutting a tunnel through a mountain, they had exploded charges of gelignite every day. But those explosions had been carefully prepared, exactly measured, controlled by a skilled foreman, and surrounded by precautions for safety. It was wholly and entirely different to be travelling at speed, on a rough and narrow road that overhung a huge and steep descent to coal-black waters, in a lorry full of gelignite that was driven by a self-proclaimed and self-conscious anarchist who apparently took a pure-minded and aesthetic delight in explosions.

Rory grew aware of the dryness of his mouth and little draughts of fear in the warmth of his arm-pits; and because he felt that his own health and well-being were now precarious, he admitted a certain tenderness to others who might, in similar fashion, be exposed to the irruption of unexpected violence. He looked sideways at the hard composure and irrational assurance of the Anarchist's high-coloured face—straddled by those sinister, steel-rimmed spectacles—and acknowledged a fleeting sympathy with all humanity, that is forever at the mercy of men dominated by ideas. He persuaded himself, with conscious effort, that he must persist in his purpose of revenge, but not for a moment did he succumb to the temptation of blowing up Katie and Lachlan in their snug villa; but sought excuses for declining the Anarchist's generous offer.

He mumbled and stumbled over his reasons, and the Anarchist, perceiving the shallow sentimentality of his objections, grew more insistent in his assertion that a good explosion was the proper termination of Lachlan's turpitude and Katie's infidelity; and drove a little faster.

They turned a corner, and half a mile away, where the road rose steeply to a bare and narrow ridge, saw a stationary line of motor-cars, lorries, a bus, and more cars. A small and ancient Morris, towing a new and heavy caravan, had failed to climb the hill, and all the others had, perforce, come to a halt behind the holiday-makers who now stood distraught at the roadside. The typical domestic group: a defeated man, his angry wife, her bewildered mother, and two screaming children. All, and eight or ten frustrated vehicles behind them, were poised on the tall and abrupt hillside above dark Loch Duich.

The Anarchist, muttering his annoyance, approached the rearward vehicle in the stayed procession; and quickly stopped as it began to slide backwards down the hill. Its brakes had failed, and the road was greasy. It was out of control, and Rory could see the agitation of the driver and the woman beside him. He opened the near door of the cab and jumped clear before the retreating car struck them. For a moment or two he cowered in a ditch, absurdly waiting for an explosion; and when he looked up saw that the lorry now stood slantwise across the road, and the intruding car seemed firmly attached to its bonnet. He decided that his association with the Anarchist had come to a natural end, and with an inspiring feeling of relief—though Kyle was still some six or seven miles away—he left the scene of collision and stasis without the formality of saying goodbye, and resolved to walk the rest of the way.

Most of the drivers and passengers of the halted procession were now pushing and heaving at the delapidated small Morris whose failure had produced the stoppage on the hill, and no one paid much attention to Rory as he left the road and took his own line across country; with professional instinct he chose the line that offered least to observers.

He was in no hurry to reach Kyle, for he had realised from near the beginning of his escapade that it would be folly to cross over to the island by the regular ferry; he knew the ferrymen, and they knew him. His intention was to find a rowing-boat in the darkness, and be his own ferryman. And that he accomplished, for he came to Kyle, or its outskirts, after dark, and having slept for an hour or two in the lee of a haystack, went to look for a boat, and found one tied to the railway pier. He rowed across the narrow strait, and pulled the boat high up on a sandy beach so that the owner would suffer no loss except a few hours' anxiety and the trivial labour of rowing it home again. And then he set out on the last stage of his journey, the penultimate chapter in his imagined saga of revenge.

The village where Lachlan and his faithless Katie lived was still
asleep when Rory reached it. The long, roadside, double line of houses stood so still and silent under the waning dark that they seemed bereft of life, a deserted hamlet in a world abandoned, by fate or its own consciousness, to the nullity of an experiment that had failed. No movement, no sound—save from an open window through which came the drone of a Glasgow holiday-maker's resounding snore—and Rory again felt some doubt of his purpose. He felt the emptiness, the fatuity, of taking revenge on a world of ghosts. But he stiffened resolution by circumspect reconnaissance of Lachlan's house, with its two ground-floor front windows displaying, in shadow, the indecent richness of a grocer's shop—the opulence of smoked hams and exotic fruits tinned in their syrup, of Oriental rice and many sorts of cheese, of oranges from Palestine and raisins from the shores of the Middle Sea—and then by wilful remembrance of Katie's milk-white beauty and her perfidy. Quietly, and with purpose renewed, he found, opposite the back door, a place where he could hide himself, and waited patiently for the house to waken.

Slowly the morning dawned, and before the sun had risen an upper window, lightly curtained, was palely illumined by the flame of an oil-lamp. A few minutes later the light momentarily vanished, to re-appear in the kitchen, of which the larger window was uncurtained; and through its glass Rory could see, in her early morning dishevelment, a scantily clad Katie, and a little while later Lachlan. He could hear, too, their voices, which were raised beyond the pitch of friendly conversation. Then Katie opened the back door, to put out the cat, and returning to the kitchen, left it open; and now Rory could hear clearly what they were saying.

They were talking in their native tongue—in Gaelic—and Gaelic, as all the world knows, is a language tuned and fashioned for the use of poets: a language of exquisite sensitivity, of tenderness and minute perception of the hundred differences in human moods and natural beauty. But what the world, in general, does not know, is that Gaelic is equally powerful in abuse and vituperation, and has at its command a vocabulary unrivalled in its lewd, rude, obscene, and scatological terminology. And the conversation that Rory overheard was not poetical, but vituperative from the beginning, and as it developed grew flowers of speech that were marvellously coarse and hardy.

It was evident that Katie was in a bad temper. She wore only her vest and petticoat—Lachlan was in shirt and trousers—and the tempest of her voice was reiterated in the wild movement of her bare arms, in the tumult of her breast. They were quarrelling very bitterly, and Katie was accusing Lachlan of every fault a husband could openly display,
and of others that only the finest and most percipient imagination could discern. ‘You are just the mockery of a man!' she cried. ‘A miserable and puny mockery of manhood, all dressed-up in fatness and hypocrisy! You're meaner than an old ha'penny, worn thin as paper, and falser in your promises than a fart from a fat belly that boasts of richness and only expresses wind! Oh, damn your puny, misshapen little soul to everlasting hell, Lachlan, for you took me away from a good man, a fine man, a great man who would have brought me great pleasure—and all you have given me in exchange is the sight and smell of your shop that offers riches I can never handle, and there's nothing in you worth handling either!'

To all this Rory listened with surprise and deep pleasure, and his enjoyment was enlarged when Lachlan, trying vainly to defend himself, was overwhelmed by a denunciation of his weaknesses that grew ever more vehement and destructive. Katie, indeed, went too far. Her imagination and her knowledge of disappointment, in alliance with the richness of Gaelic, expressed themselves in language so intemperately abusive that Lachlan—his fat face glistening in the lamp-light, his fat stomach tremulous above his trousers—tried to silence her, not by counter-argument, but by force. He gripped her by the upper arms, to shake and reprove her. And then Katie hit him. At first with her open hands, then with her clenched fists. Lachlan, feebly defending himself, butted her in the stomach. Then Katie took a frying-pan from the kitchen-stove and with it beat him about the head and ears. She drove him from the house, out through the kitchen door, and as he ran his trousers fell, and he stumbled and halted to pull them up. Katie, unrelenting, followed with a screaming gale of abuse, and the frying-pan re-echoed from his head with the hollow desolation of a bell-buoy ringing in the trough of desperate seas.

Big Rory, with his head through the privet-hedge that divided their little back-garden, lay shouting with laughter. He felt weak and consumed by laughter, and all his rage dissolved in laughter. His long-nursed and tenderly cherished desire to punish Lachlan and humiliate his lovely Katie were blown away by the gale of her insensate wrath. He felt no emotion but a child's delight in the clowns' performance at a circus, and when Katie came back to the garden—her ruffled hair like Medusa's locks, her breasts heaving under their thin concealment of cotton, and her lovely face sharp and shining in anger—he got up and took her in his arms. She, so consumed in rage as to be incapable of much surprise, said ‘What are you doing here?'

‘I came,' said Rory, ‘to wish you great happiness. God bless you, my dear, for you've healed a terrible sore in my heart. And now I'm
going to make reparation to you of something I took from you long ago, for you've won your right to wear it again.'

She, in the aftermath of her anger—as if exhausted by it—offered no resistance, and Rory led her to the little wooden privy at the bottom of the garden, below the privet-hedge, and kneeling down wrenched out the nail with which he had fastened her engagement-ring—that had been his engagement-ring—to an inconspicuous place below the seat.

‘I nailed it there,' he said, ‘to show my scorn of you, and now I take it out and give it you again to show my love and admiration of you. And to thank God you're married to Lachlan, not to me!'

Katie put his ring on her finger, and began in a soothing, smoothering voice to tell him that she had always loved him, and though she had made a great mistake—but Rory interrupted her, laughing again, and with a pinch for her breast and a light kiss on her open, bewildered mouth, left her and walked up the village street till he came to the constable's house.

The constable was still in bed, but Rory knocked him up, and said, ‘Donald, I have come to surrender myself. I am going back to prison, a happy man, and you will take me there.'

Donald's wife, who was a good woman, had come out too, and she said, ‘You'll need your breakfast before you go.'

So they had breakfast together, of porridge and tea and fresh herring, and then the constable said to Rory, ‘If I'm to take you back to prison, I'll need to have your promise that you'll come quietly.'

‘No, no,' said Rory, ‘that I can't give you,' and as they walked down the road together he stopped, a dozen times, to laugh; and his laughter was twice as loud as the wrath of Katie's voice and the drum-note of the frying-pan beating on Lachlan's head.

Above and behind them the great hills shed the morning mist to meet the morning sun, and the sea below them, flirting with the west wind, lifted frills of white lace. An island, hove-to under a single cloud, floated on blue water to the north, and the smoke of cottage chimneys pirouetted in the breeze. A heron stood sentry on the stony beach, a cock-grouse shouted from the heather.

‘Give me a cigarette,' said Rory, ‘for I won't be smoking for the next few months.'

He cupped his hands to light it, and laughed again. ‘Oh, Donald,' he said, ‘let us never again spend our strength in anger, or waste our time on black thoughts of revenge. No, no! We can leave that to the women. For there's no one goes unpunished who takes a woman to his house.'

Perdis The Young Queen of Jocynthia, had often heard of the storyteller Malis. People will talk of such a one though they have never listened to his tales, and strongly disapprove matter of which they are thus ignorant. In this way it happened that Queen Perdis had an unfavourable opinion of Malis.

There was, perhaps, a small excuse for her attitude in that some of his most famous stories were flavoured with a kind of lewdness, and it was perfectly well known that these were not the historical record of things which had really happened, but mere literary concoctions. The conscientious historian who, out of pure respect for actuality, includes in his narrative a few items of human rudeness, may and indeed should be forgiven; for truth is a worthy mistress. But the man who invents such things, either from his own wanton delight in them or to amuse others whom he knows to be equally light-minded, can expect no pardon, especially from those who do not listen to his stories.

It was also true that Malis was a very ugly man, though there were many who did not object to the irregular contours, the bright colour, and the sometimes ridiculous expression of his face. These were the people who hurried eagerly and happily sat to hear him in the market-place on market-days, in a farm-kitchen or the lower end of a great hall at night, sometimes in idle weather at a cross-roads or in an orchard, and best of all at the inn of The Poor Peasant and his Cow, where Malis sometimes drank so much that he told stories without troubling to collect any fee; and these love tales, it was said, were better than all his others. Often they had to do with the disreputable friar Brother Bonamy, who, though nothing but a figment of Malis's invention, had enjoyed in fiction so many and such delightful—even if reprehensible—experiences, that Malis himself had almost come to believe in his real existence, while his audience nearly always took it for granted that he lived; and sometimes the natives of Jocynthia boasted to strangers of having met the celebrated friar, and even suffered under his roguery. Two or three impostors had also been caught unworthily exploiting the reputation that Malis had made for him.