The Goose Girl and Other Stories (12 page)

She beat upon the sliding glass that divided them from the driver, and when he drew it open, asked him sharply, ‘Do you know where we are?'

‘I do not!' he said with wild vexation in his husky voice. ‘I'm lost entirely.'

‘Well!' she said. ‘What do we do now?'

The driver, aware that he owed them some explanation, turned his purple face and shouted, ‘It's drunk I am! As drunk as a pig!' And angrily closed the sliding glass.

‘But this is dangerous,' she said, and let Latimer take her hand.

‘He's going very slowly now. We shan't come to any harm,' he answered.

Again the driver opened the slide between them, and now in a more affable tone declared, ‘But it's all right for you! I'm not charging you for this.' And pulled down his flag.

‘Is that any comfort?' she asked.

‘It's the handsomest thing I ever heard!
Bonosque soles effugere—'

‘Darling, you're not drunk too?'

‘No, of course not. I'm misquoting Horace. Or is it Martial? I believe it's Martial.'

‘But what does it mean?'

‘You learnt Latin at school, didn't you?'

‘What difference does that make?'

‘None at all, none at all. But we haven't time to talk about education, have we? Listen to what I'm saying, it's most important.
Solesque
—no, that's wrong, you've put me off.
Bonosque soles effugere atque abire sentit, qui nobis pereunt et non imputantur.
—There now! Aren't we in luck?'

‘How do I know, unless you tell me what it means?'

‘Just what the driver said. No one's going to charge this to our account. Ireland, God bless it, is neutral still!'

The driver, deciding to try his luck in the opposite direction, turned right-about in the breadth of the street without slackening speed, and threw Corinna on to Latimer's breast before she could decide whether that was her intention or not. He, clasping her and advantage firmly together, began without loss of time to kiss her fondly, repeatedly, and with such enthusiasm as was bound to provoke a reciprocal warmth. The driver, looking this way and that but scorning to ask the help of any passer-by, turned east, west, north, and south to find a familiar landmark and the address that he had long since forgotten.

He looked for it in Ballsbridge and the neighbourhood of Glasnevin cemetery. He had a notion it might be in Ringsend, and not long after was out past Kilmainham Gaol and on the road to Mullingar. But open country frightened him, and he turned in a great hurry and drove at high speed past Guinness's Brewery, then loitered thoughtfully on College Green, and slowly, like a man in a trance, patrolled O'Connell Street and Grafton Street. He circumnavigated Merrion Square and went twice round St Stephen's Green to see if it was there. He remembered Rathmines and with fresh hope increased his speed again, but was perplexed by many streets that looked the same, and with a salmon's instinct in the spring turned north again to dawdle by the Liffey. Memory stirred more strongly in him, but a memory quite irrelevant, and for a long time he waited by the gate of the Rotunda Hospital, where he had been born. When at last he returned to Latimer's hotel and deposited Latimer, alone, he was nearly sober.

Latimer paid him off, and turning to go in encountered for the second time the girl with the collecting-box to whom he had spoken earlier in the evening.

She held the box in front of him, a little wearily. ‘For the language,' she begged.

‘Go home,' he told her, ‘for you're wasting your time. There are no words for it in any language. Joy's inenarrable, as every cabman knows!'

Thay threpit that scho deit of thrist, and
maid
a gud end.
Efter hir dede, scho dredit nought in hevin for to duell,
And sa to hevin the heiway dreidles scho wend.

Dunbar

Nine Out of every ten people in Edinburgh never look at anything but the pavements and the shallow shop-windows and the figuration of neighbours as belittled as themselves. This is for safety, and to keep their wits from wandering; because whoever will raise his head suddenly to the Castle may see Asgard looming in the mist, and the hills above Holyroodhouse, that one day are no more than slopes for children to play on, the next are mountains that thrust huge shoulders through the clouds and bare their monstrous brows in the heights of the sky. So also if you look down at the houses that press numerously against the outer walls of Holyrood you may see nothing but a multitude of mean roofs. But you may as easily surprise a coven of witches dancing in the smoke, and warlocks leaping on the chimney pots.

This was a sight that Kind Kitty saw whenever she came up out of the Canongate to sit on a seat in the gardens under the Calton Hill, with a little flat bottle of whisky in her pocket, and a bonnet with a broken feather precariously pinned to her dirty grey hair.

Kind Kitty was never afraid to look at the hills and the air-drawn heights of the town, for though they might steal her wits away she had no wealth or position that needed her wits' attention, and nothing to lose, though her thoughts took holiday for days on end, but a dozen hens and the wire-netting that confined them. It was the odour of hens that strangers first noticed, and most urgently disliked, when Kitty sat down beside them in the gardens. It overcame the other smells that accompanied her, of smoke, of clothes incredibly old, of a body long unwashed, of yesterday's beer and the morning's dram. It was a violent unexpected smell, and Kitty's casual neighbours would soon rise and leave her. Then she would grumble through her old blue lips, and peer after them malevolently with her red and rheumy eyes, and unwrapping a piece of newspaper from the little bottle she
would take a quick mouthful of whisky. ‘Tae hell with you, then, for a high-minded upstart,' she would mutter, and wipe her mouth, and a water-drop from the end of her nose, with the back of her bony hand. But in a minute or two she would forget the insult, when her bleary eyes were captured by witches and warlocks dancing in the smoke, or by a flank of the Pamirs that pushed its stony ribs against the firmament. Then she would think of life and death, of the burnside in Appin where she had been born, of the great soldier, Sir Hector McOstrich, and the lovely wicked Lady Lavinia. The weave of life, like gunmetal silk shot with bright yellow, shone for her, at such an angle, with the remote and golden-lovely frailty of sunset after a rainy day. Misery in the morning was forgotten, and squalor after noon, beneath that aureate sky, returned like rain to the deeps of the earth.

But sooner or later the sunset would fade from her thoughts, the hills diminish, the warlocks dissolve into bitter vapour, and her belly protest its emptiness with loud exclamatory repetition. Then, with a twitch to her bonnet, a hitch to her dusty skirt, and a pull at her broken stays, she would rise in a sudden temper, and muttering furious complaints against the littleness of small whisky bottles, she would hobble back to the Canongate, and stop to stare balefully at The Hole in the Wall, whose doors were not yet open. ‘The mealy-mou'ed thowless thieves,' she would mutter. ‘The bletherin' kirk-gaun' puggies!' And she would spit on the pavement to show her contempt for the law, and those who made it, that public-houses should be closed while thirst still grew unchecked.

It was drink, not food, that her empty stomach clamoured for. She ate little, and took no pleasure in such tasteless stuff as bread and potatoes and tinned beef. But for beer and black stout and whisky she had so great a love that her desire for them was unceasing, and her relish for their several flavours more constant than any carnal love. Except for a shilling or two that she was sometimes compelled to pay for rent, and a few coppers that went on corn for her hens, she spent all her money on drink and still was dry-mouthed for three or four days out of seven. She had the Old Age pension, and ten shillings a week was paid her, though unwillingly, by Sir Hector's grandson, who was not a soldier but a stockbroker, and bitterly resented such a burden on his estate. This income might have been sufficient to preserve her from the most painful and extreme varieties of thirst had she been content to drink draught ale, and that in solitude. But Kitty was both extravagant and generous, she liked whisky and good company, friendship and bottled beer, and twenty shillings a week was sadly insufficient for such rich amusement. Many of her friends were poorer than herself,
and none was more wealthy, so their return for Kitty's entertainment was always inadequate. They would sometimes treat her to half a pint of beer, more rarely to a nip of whisky, but usually they repaid her with cups of tea, or half a herring, which gave her no pleasure whatever. She never calculated the profit and loss of good-fellowship, however, and so long as her neighbours had lively conversation and a cheerful spirit she would share her last shilling with them.

But a friend of hers, an old cast whore called Mima Bird, found a ten-shilling note one Christmas, and buying a dozen bottles of Bass invited Kitty to come and drink six of them. The nobility of this entertainment inspired Kitty with a great desire to emulate it—not in vulgar competition, not for the ostentation of surpassing it, but simply to give again, and enjoy again, the delights of strong liquor and warm fellowship—so after much thought, and with high excitement, she formed a plan and made arrangements for a Hogmanay party that would put the Old Year to bed with joy and splendour.

New Year's Eve fell on a Saturday, and on Friday Kitty drew her Old Age pension and cashed the ten-shilling order that came from young Mr McOstrich. But a pound was not nearly enough to furnish such a party as she intended. She went to see James Campbell, the landlord of The Hole in the Wall, and after long discussion came to an agreement with him, and pledged her whole income for the first two weeks in January in return for thirty-three shillings in ready money and the loan of five tumblers. These were the best terms she could get, for Campbell was a hard man.

But Kitty did not waste much time in bemoaning so heavy a rate of interest. She had no reverence for money, as respectable people have, nor concern for the future; and her mind was occupied with entrancing preparations for the party. She bought two bottles of whisky, two dozen bottles of beer, and a dozen of stout. Nothing like so huge and extravagant an array had ever been seen in her dirty little kitchen in Baxter's Close, and the spectacle filled her with excitement that yielded presently to a kind of devotion, and then became pure childlike joy. She set the beer, orderly in rank, on the table, with the two whisky bottles on the mantelpiece, and the porter like a round fender before the empty fire. Then she stood here and there to admire the picture, and presently rearranged the bottles and marshalled the beer, like a fence, in front of the wire-netting that closed her dozen hens in a small extension of the kitchen that might, with a more orthodox tenant, have been the scullery. The hens clapped their wings, and encouraged her with their clucking. Then she made patterns and plans on the floor, now a cross, before which she signed herself with the Cross, and now a
rough plan of Tearlach's Hall, in Appin, where Sir Hector and Lady Lavinia had lived in pride and many varieties of sin. Her old hands took delicately the smooth necks of the bottles, she patted into place a label that was half-unstuck, she made a shape like a rose, the bottles standing shoulder to shoulder in the middle, and the tears ran down her cheek to see the loveliness of that pattern. Weary at last, replete with happiness, she fell asleep with a bottle of whisky in her arms.

When morning came she woke in pride to be confronted with such riches, and her demeanour, that only her hens observed, was uncommonly dignified. Setting the bottles on the table, according to their kind and now without fantasy, she carefully considered her arrangements and debated their sufficiency for the imminent party. Was her house properly furnished for entertainment? There were five tumblers that she had borrowed, one that she possessed, a bed where four might sit, a chair, a stool, and more drink than had ever been seen in one room in all her memory of Baxter's Close. What else could be needed for the pleasure of her guests?

A thought entered her mind that she first repelled and then suffered to return. Some of her visitors might like something to eat. If that were so, it would be a great nuisance, and for a little while Kitty thought impatiently about the frailties of humankind and the monstrous demands that people made for their contentment. But presently she counted her money and found she had still four shillings left. So she put on her bonnet and went out shopping.

The wind blew coldly down the Canongate, with a flourish of rain on its ragged edge, but Kitty, with money in her purse and in her heart the intention of spending it, was too important to notice such small discomfort, and going first to a baker's she bought for two shillings a Scotch bun. With that fierily sweet and bitter-black dainty under her arm she turned and walked slowly, over greasy pavements, to a corn chandler's in the High Street, where for ninepence she obtained a large bag of Indian corn for her hens. Then she returned to the Canongate, and having purchased three-pennyworth of cheese she entered The Hole in the Wall, at the very moment when its doors opened, and made a satisfying meal of a shilling's worth of draught beer and the bright wedge of American cheddar.

The afternoon was slow in passing, but Kitty amused herself with ingenious new arrangements of the bottles, and with feeding her hens, and soon after six o'clock her first guest arrived, who was Mima Bird, the old whore. Then came Mrs Smiley, who made a small living by selling bootlaces; Mrs Hogg, who
should have been well-off, her husband having had both his legs shot off while serving in the Black Watch, but he spent all his pension on threepenny bets and twopenny trebles; old Rebecca Macafee, who had been a tinker till she married a trawler's cook, who deserted her, and varicose veins kept her from the country roads; and Mrs Crumb, who has a good job as a lavatory attendant, but had to support a half-witted husband and three useless sons. These were Kind Kitty's oldest and favourite friends, and when she saw them all sitting in her kitchen each with a dram inside her to warm her stomach and loosen her tongue and flush her cheeks—each with a glass of beer or stout in her hand and another bottle beside her—then she was so happy that all of a sudden she cackled with laughter, and rocked to and fro on her stool, and began to sing an old song in a loud hoarse voice: