The Goose Girl and Other Stories (25 page)

The pilgrim rubbed his hands in a contented way. ‘Now you can go and buy bread for our supper without submitting to the unpleasantness for which you were so bravely prepared a few minutes ago,' he said.

While they were absent he spoke seriously to Smoky Philip, saying, ‘Are you not yet convinced of the iniquity of your efforts to upset the divine discipline of things as they are? Surely you have now had conclusive evidence that the existing scheme is best for us all, and that faith in Providence is more fruitful than the impiety of works?'

‘If only I had the Philosopher's Stone,' said Smoky Philip, ‘I could change those pennies into gold, and then instead of bread and onions, we might sup on quails and pig's feet and wine. I'm very fond of pig's feet.'

The following day, and the day after that too, the miracle was repeated: just as Dowsabell and Beta were ready to go out and sacrifice themselves for the common good, a bright new penny appeared on the floor and made their immolation unnecessary. The pilgrim was delighted, but in the manner of Beta and Dowsabell there appeared a growing constraint.

Meanwhile the philosopher became more and more engrossed in his researches, and as the smell from his pot grew hourly richer and filthier he busied himself, in preparation for the next process of putrefaction, with the braying of horn in a mortar, the distillation of sour vinegar, and the blending of the contents of many small vials. He paid no heed to his daughters' recurring predicament, to the regular interposition of Providence, or to the entertainment of his guest. He was immersed in his art, and though the house
consisted only of one room and a garret, Smoky Philip lived, as it were, alone.

On the fifth day of the pilgrim's visit, however, he was disturbed by a very loud and violent noise which, when he first became aware of it, appeared to emanate from some distant part of the town. It came gradually nearer, and finally, when Smoky Philip really gave his attention to it, was discovered to be the voices of Dowsabell, Beta, and the pilgrim mingled together in angry controversy. Inspecting them with more care, the philosopher perceived that his daughters were not only shouting at the pilgrim, but rudely buffeting, scratching, and slapping him; and had already torn out all his hair.

‘What's the matter?' he asked.

‘You blundering, smug, impertinent, officious nightmare of untimely piety!' shouted Dowsabell, paying no attention to her father's question.

‘Snag, stopper, clog, lumbering obstruction! Beefwit, wind in the pipes, bird-brain! Robber of a poor girl's honest independence!' cried Beta.

And the pilgrim shrieked, now to one and now to the other, ‘I am a saint, I tell you, and I was only doing my duty! I am St Polydore of Cappadocia, and I go all over the world performing kindly miracles.'

‘Miracles!' snorted Dowsabell. ‘Father, he planted those pennies himself! We caught him at it. He was hiding one in the floor when we came in, and he's got dozens more in a leather bag!'

‘Dear me,' said the philosopher.

‘Oh, interference! fish-bone in a cat's throat!' said Dowsabell, and thrust the pilgrim to the door.

‘You needless thing, you figseed in a hollow tooth!' added Beta, and, picking up the stool on which he was used to sit, hit the pilgrim very brutally between the shoulders.

St Polydore of Cappadocia howled with pain, picked up his skirts, and ran.

Dowsabell and Beta, looking very handsome with their cheeks red and their eyes still sparkling, glared after him.

‘Him and his penny miracles!' said Dowsabell.

‘Wasting our time like that, to no purpose at all!' said Beta.

Dowsabell coughed. ‘There was certainly no advantage in putting off the evil hour.'

‘That's what I meant,' Beta explained. ‘Well, shall we go now? Is my hair all right?'

‘Very attractive,' said Dowsabell. ‘Do you like the new way in which I've done mine?'

‘My children,' said the philosopher, ‘will you remember to buy me some brass knobs, a packet of sulphur, and some dry wood? And don't you think we might have pig's feet for supper tonight? I'm very tired of bread and onions.'

Rory More had served all but forty-eight days of his sentence when, under cover of a hailstorm that came down with a roar, like a sudden white curtain, he ran from his working-party in the outer quarry. It was not an act of prudence, but Rory was not a prudent man. He was hot-tempered and impulsive; and like many Highlanders he had a long memory for slight or injustice and could nurse an injury as a young mother doting on her first child. In the two and a half years, more or less, that he had spent in prison, he had sometimes lived for days at a stretch indifferent to his surroundings, barely conscious of where he was, because his mind was obsessed by indignant memory and full, to the total exclusion of diurnal pettiness, of the black-haired, sloe-eyed, white-skinned bitch who had jilted him, and the paunchy, complacent, psalm-singing grocer whose money had tempted her away.

Morose and motionless in his cell, he would imagine himself coming suddenly upon them, and the consternation on their faces. With the luxury of deliberation he would hit her first: his knuckles, in a brusque back-hander, across her pretty, sensual mouth (her lips now trembling for fear as for a kiss) and the flat of his hand with a slap like a sail in the wind on her tender cheek—that would be enough for her—and then a chop to the jaw, a short, right-handed, down-cutting chop to her fat husband's sagging jaw, a swinging left to catch him as he staggered and jerk him up again, a couple of pile-drivers sinking deep into the short ribs .... So much for a start, and as he pictured himself taking so lively a revenge he would tremble in the ecstasy of his delight and wrath.

He had, indeed, already dealt with them in such a way, and done worse as well; which accounted for his prison-sentence. But once was not enough, and every few weeks the desire to punish them again—fat Lachlan the godly grocer and white-skinned Katie with her black hair growing down to a widow's peak—would waken in his mind, and isolate him in the agony of his hatred, the imagined bliss of punching his hatred home on quivering, bruised, and crying flesh.

On the day of his escape he had been thinking greedily of his release from prison, that now lay round the corner of a few weeks only, and from hour to hour his appetite for revenge grew more greedy till it
possessed him entirely. No room was left for caution or common sense—at no time did they occupy much of his mind—and when the white and roaring squall blew suddenly and hid him from the warders and his fellow-convicts, he turned with the sudden impulse of a stag in rut and ran like a stag into the heart of it.

It was a day of equinoctial wrath in the wild beginning of September—the time for sudden, furious gales—and since early morning the great, gaunt prison-fortress on the cold north-eastern corner of Scotland had looked through its bleak windows at a roaring, white-wreathed sea and a sky that was sometimes vacant and ice-blue, but more often a chaos of low, fast-driving cloud and pelting showers of rain or sleet. Dawn had been bitter cold, and by ten o'clock it was arctic cold. The sleet turned to hail.

While the squall lasted Big Rory ran without check, on a straight line and hard as he could go, but when the sky began to clear he went through a bare and open landscape with a stooped and modified pace, with the cunning of experience, and one eye for cover, the other for the malignancy of chance observers. In his youth he had been a gillie—a stalker's gillie—in a great deer-forest in the western Highlands, and since then he had served, both at home and abroad, in a well-trained and hard-working commando. He knew, then, the use of ground, he had an eye for direction and a sharpened sense of where concealment lay; and, more important than any training or natural ability, that day his luck ran with him.

His course lay to windward of the prison, or a little west of windward, and if an alarm was sounded, by shot or bell, he heard nothing of it. He went fast and warily and presently came to the backward part of a roadside cottage. It was a trim and decent-looking little house, with a patch of gorse growing close behind it. He lay in the gorse, to see what movement and evidence of habitation there was in the cottage, and only a minute later a small motor-van drew up at the front door. It was new-looking, smart, and navy-blue in colour, with a trade-name on the side in discreet gold letters. A man came out, bare-headed, in a blue raincoat; whistling as he walked, cocksure, a vain little man like a dance-band leader with oiled black hair. He went to the back door of the cottage, carrying a brown-paper parcel, and a woman came out to meet him.

She was a cosy, tidy-looking creature with a plain, square face and an apron round her waist. She reached out for the parcel, but there was more to excite her than that. She showed clearly enough what was in her mind by the twittering way she talked, by the coyness with which she patted her hair and smoothed her apron, by the animation
that fluttered the flatness of her face like a breeze of wind on a loose garden-gate; and the cocksure little man looked at his wrist-watch and pretended he had no time, but was eager enough for all that, and just playing to his vanity. She looked this way and that, she pretended to be modest and regretful; then smiled like sunshine in a puddle and held out her hands. He tried for a kiss and missed by half a yard. She waved at him, dismissively, and ran indoors; but didn't shut the door. He, now thwarted and desirous, followed like a ferret down a rabbit-warren; and the door, behind him, closed with a bang.

Rory, under a gorse-bush, swore blackly at them both. As if to remind him that more wickedness lay outside prison walls than ever had been confined within them, they had showed him, for his first glimpse of the larger world, the frailty and almost certainly the falsity of humankind. The frailty and falsity of woman, the vanity and lust of man, about which he had lost his Highland temper and gone to prison; so blackly he cursed them in the full scope and minute particularity of the Gaelic tongue, which was his native language; and then, with an access of common sense, ran at a crouching trot to the road where the van stood vacant and unattended. He looked inside and saw that it carried a cargo of draper's goods and haberdashery: socks and shirts, small-clothes, ribbons and jumpers, children's shoes and towels and goods of that sort. It was a small van, light enough to push, and it pointed to the way he thought he must go. He released the brake, and putting a hand to the wheel, his shoulder in the window-frame, he walked away with it. Fifty yards from the cottage he got in, started the engine, and drove off at top speed.

The road, for a start, pointed to the west, and that was where he must go. He had to cross the breadth of Scotland, from the bare and cold east coast of Buchan to the mountainous, blue-shadowed, rain-dripping west, but the road that promised so fair a beginning was delusive, and led to a tangle, a reticulation, a repeated intersection of roads, so now he turned this way, now that, but with his nose for the compass-points and his eye for the grain of the countryside he made westing wherever he could, and his luck rode with him. No one stopped or challenged him, and presently he came to a snug village with a river running through it and a wood on the rising slopes beyond; and over the bridge, where the road branched left and right, he stopped and wondered which way to turn. To his left, with its garden running steeply down to the river, was a fine square house that anyone who knew Scotland could identify at first sight as the manse; and before its front door, while Rory lingered, he had time to observe a domestic argument.

The minister and his wife and a woman who might have been their housekeeper, but perhaps was only their daily help, stood below the steps that led to the front door and moved with fretful animation, but no concerted purpose, about a very small but highly polished and well-cared-for motor-car. They were trying to find the best way of stowing, in so minute a car, three large suitcases, a hat-box, two untidy parcels, something wrapped in sacking, and a bag of golf-clubs. The minister, a tall, well-fleshed, and burly man, was impatient with the folly and ineptitude of his women-folk, but did nothing to help them; his wife fluttered like a well-meaning Rhode Island Red whose chickens were menaced by a hen-harrier; and the housekeeper (if such she was) tried unavailingly to force two suitcases and that which was wrapped in sacking into the too-exiguous boot.

For half a minute, perhaps, Rory watched them, and even his obsessed and purposive mind admitted the comedy of what he saw. But purpose dominated, instinct decided, and turning left he drove on, up hill and into the wood. Ten minutes later, however, he realised the meaning of what he had seen, its implication; he saw his chance to get a new suit of clothes. The minister and his wife were going off on holiday—housekeeper (or their daily help) had been dressed for departure too. By now the manse would be empty, and surely there would be something useful in the minister's wardrobe? He was a big man: big enough to wear clothes that would fit Rory.

Rory drove slowly on till he came to a cart-track through the wood, and for a hundred yards went up the rutted path till he came to firm ground, and then drove in among the trees and discovered a harbour for the draper's van in a copse of young firs. Before leaving it he found a collared shirt that he could wear—his neck measured seventeen inches—and underclothes, a decent tie, and socks. He took a couple of handkerchiefs and an electric torch that lay with the draper's gloves; but he left the gloves, having no use for such paltry, citified comforts. He waited in the wood till it grew dark, and then walked back to the village.

He had little trouble in entering the manse. He made a cautious reconnaissance, assured himself it was empty, and then from the washing-green pulled a handful of turf and with that broke a pane in the kitchen window. He put his arm through, undid the latch, pushed up the window, and stepped in. He used his torch discreetly, and quickly found his way upstairs to the minister's bedroom. He drew the curtains, and shone his torch more boldly. In a big, old-fashioned, mahogany wardrobe he found a pair of corduroy trousers and an old tweed jacket, patched at the elbows and the cuffs with leather, that
the minister probably wore for gardening; though they were decent enough for golf.