The Goose Girl and Other Stories (34 page)

‘Two days,' she answered. ‘It's a swell place, isn't it? Kind of romantic, don't you think?'

‘Sure,' he said. ‘It's the most romantic city in America.'

‘I wish I knew half as much about it as you do.'

‘Then you wouldn't want to come on any sightseeing trips,' he said, laughing.

‘That's so,' she confessed. ‘I hadn't thought of that.' And laughed too.

When we reached an old plantation house the guide began to talk with his usual felicity, and the tourists turned from one side to the other as he bade them; peered out of windows; and pointed out objects of interest to their friends. The guide's patter was unfailing, and his smile made everything he said seem very agreeable.

We passed a broad field, tree-guarded, in which cows were grazing. ‘See those cows?' he said. ‘They're what provide Noo Orleans with all its milk and butter and eggs.'

There was a shout of laughter as the tourists detected this happy blunder. Al pretended to be puzzled by their mirth, and asked what was the matter. When his error was explained to him he pushed back his cap, scratched his pale broad forehead in a rueful way that his
smile belied, and said in a tone of mock penitence, ‘Well, you can't expect one man to know everything, can you?'

Long after the others had exhausted their mirth the woman in the front seat continued to be merry about Al's
gaffe.
At first she laughed outright, so heartily that she found occasion to dab her eyes with a small slightly-soiled handkerchief. Then, overcoming the more boisterous part of her emotion, she bent her head and giggled quietly, as if there were some specially titillating feature of the joke, invisible to others, that she was privately enjoying. She glanced upward at the guide, with a tentative intimacy in her look, as though she were offering to share this secret with him, or at least to show how much she appreciated it.

Al met her obscure glance of understanding with his jovial unchanging smile.

On the following morning I went to look once again at the old French Market. I had already been there two or three times, but its fascination was not easily exhausted. The market gardeners who brought produce there were descendants of the long-since evicted settlers of Acadia, and their language, as they argued, expostulated, gossiped, was a mutilated and antique French.

Their shabby motor-trucks and old unpainted horsewagons, loaded with beans, potatoes, and water-melons, stood in lines at right angles to the pavement. Most of the horses wore peaked straw hats through which their ears protruded. The broad pavement was shaded by awnings, between which came hot bars of sun. The merchants were a curious mixture. They were olive-skinned, they were dark and Mediterranean-seeming.

There were negroes and mulattoes, there were old women in sun-bonnets, fat French-looking women, lazy men half-sleeping in the shadow of their wagons, and here a couple of men playing cards on a packing-case table. Behind the baskets and sacks of potatoes piled along the pavement were dark little shops in which men, their hats tilted back, sat to eat and drink. Some of the shops were curiously lit as if by an overflow of reflected light.

The baskets loaded with potatoes, the brown knobbly sacks so tightly filled with them, gave off an earthy smell, and next door to that dusty savour would be the sweet odour of pineapples. There were baskets of long bright green beans, and glossy purple egg-plant. There were hundreds of huge green water-melons, with here and there a triangular wedge cut from the side of one to show its fresh, pink, loosely-seeded flesh.

There were cantaloupes with grey mottling on their taut dull hides,
lemons from California wrapped neatly in yellow tissue paper, golden plums, and glaring red tomatoes. There were cabbages, lettuces in great leafy stacks, and strange green twisted growths like vegetable snakes or eels. There were sacks of coco-nuts.

While I walked about and observed with great delight this rich variety of fruits and men, I noticed, some little distance from me in the half-crowd, a familiar female figure. It was the woman who, on the previous day, had sat on the front seat of the motor coach. She was now moving vaguely from stall to stall, considering the profusion with sometimes a kind of bewilderment, sometimes an obvious greed. She would stop to finger the smooth tomatoes, the rough cantaloupes, and voluble men would shout to her how good and cheap they were.

She listened, not understanding what they said, and, as if frightened of being swindled, walked on reluctantly. By-and-by she looked at her watch, and, having seen the time, quickened her steps. Yielding without shame to curiosity, I followed her. She took from the bag she carried a little round case, the size of half-a-crown but thicker, that held a mirror, a puff, and a cake of solidified powder; as she walked she dabbed and rubbed her nose, that the heat had made shiny.

She turned a corner or two and came to a square in which three or four motor coaches stood empty except for their drivers. The tourists they had carried were in the Cabildo museum and other near-by buildings of a social or historical interest, where their guides elucidated for them the significance—a morsel of the significance—of such things as slave blocks, monuments, and altar-pieces, or talked glibly of Louis Philippe and the pirate Pierre Lafitte.

The woman went into the Cabildo, where Al was entertaining a party with his jocular descriptions and his smile. She joined his audience and quietly but determinedly forced her way to the front of it. Al was discussing, with ready gaiety, some leg-irons saved from the old traffic in slaves.

He recognised the woman, and when he had finished his discourse—I was looking at a case of miniatures not far away—said to her, ‘Well! Still interested in Noo Orleans?'

‘I'll say,' she answered. ‘It's awful interesting, isn't it? I've been to the French Market, and then I found myself outside of here, and remembered what you said about it yesterday. So I thought I'd come in and have a look at it. It's kind of interesting, isn't it? I didn't expect to find you here though.'

The tourists had left. Al and the woman followed them slowly, talking together. I stayed in the museum the rest of the morning because it was many degrees cooler than the streets.

That night the heat was abominable, and though I turned my ceiling-fan to full speed I couldn't sleep. It did nothing to cool the room, but only disturbed the stale damp air from its corners, churned the moist air that drifted sluggishly through the window, and sent it down on me in hot waves. As sleep was impossible I tried to entertain myself with some light and easy forms of thought. I considered the curious morality of a talking-picture I had lately seen; dissected the appalling stupidity of a remark I had recently made, and the embarrassment I had suffered; tried to remember Hilaire Belloc's poem about Peter Wanderwide; rehearsed a possible conversation with the friend whose failure to keep an appointment was causing me this discomfort; reviewed the French Market, some wrought-iron gates and half-hidden courtyards in New Orleans, and suddenly came to a remarkably vivid picture of Al with his unchanging smile, and the fat woman of the motor coach.

I began to speculate about her. She had been fairly good-looking a few years before; she was married, or had been; she was on holiday, her clothes were new, and she was alone; her attitude in the Market, her dependence on organised sightseeing, hinted that she was not accustomed to travelling far from home; despite her heavy and sometimes sullen look there was in her bearing an eagerness, a clumsy desire to enjoy herself, a greed that probably came from long repression; and her voice suggested a Middle-Western origin.

This combination of repression and the Middle West immediately suggested a story, for I had read at least a dozen novels about the spiritual indigence of life in the small towns of Ohio, Indiana, and Minnesota, and I knew, on their authority, a lot about the tragic possibilities of emotional starvation. Women like diminished shades of Emma Bovary lived on every second street, and in their questing imprisoned souls grew dreadful havoc.

There was a writing-table in my room, and plenty of notepaper. I got up, turned on the light, and began my story with a description of sightseers pausing to admire the curious burial system of New Orleans. One of the sightseers was the woman with the thick white skin, and by fixing her attention—and the reader's—on that huge gruesome apartment-house tomb, I hoped to secure an introductory suggestion of grimness, tinctured with a certain levity that, to the understanding mind, made it grimmer still. I described the genial smiling guide, and showed the beginning of the woman's attraction to him.

It was his jovial appearance that fascinated her, because it implied happiness and generosity very different from anything she had known
in her unfortunate married life. She came from a small town in Indiana. At twenty-two she had married a man double her age, stupidly attracted by his prosperous condition and an appearance of virility that he wore as falsely as a wig. He had roused her passion—it was all ready to be roused—and then his own had dwindled and died like a stream in summer; and with its disappearance had come a sleepless jealousy that made him nag and bully her, and keep her short of money lest she should buy new clothes to attract better men than himself. She was frightened of him, and clung in a dull and timid way to such comfort as he still provided—shelter and enough to eat—though his specific failure as a husband often made her nearly frantic with a kind of snivelling indignation.

At twenty-eight she was hysterical and thin, and often dreamt that she was going mad. She was terrified at the mere thought of leaving her husband, however, and too stupid to deceive him with any of the young men she knew. But at thirty-three she had grown resigned, in a sulky way, to the disabilities of her life, and was beginning to put on weight.

When her husband snarled at her she would answer in a voice as rough as his own, and taunt him with his insolvent physique. But he knew by this time her cowardly and shiftless nature, and he set no more than their proper value on her taunts, though they never failed to anger him. They were largely the admission of her helplessness. She dared not leave him and she wasn't clever enough to have a lover.

At thirty-five she was so fat that she considered dieting, though she did not practise it very much, and her fits of hysteria had given way to a recurrent bored inertia. She smoked cigarettes till her tongue was sore, and spent hours of sluggish wonder over magazines that published photographs of film-stars and gossip about Hollywood. Then her husband died of some sort of gastric trouble, and she found herself free and independent, for he had left her 8,000 dollars' worth of bonds, life insurance policies for 10,000 dollars, a two-year-old motor-car, and some indifferent furniture.

Several weeks passed before she properly realised her freedom and discovered sufficient energy and independence to enjoy it. But when three or four men began to pay her attention—everyone in town knew the extent of her fortune—she felt a sudden access of pride and vitality, and determined to forget her wasted years in prompt enjoyment. She resolved to travel, and through ignorance and ill-luck (not knowing how unpleasant was the summer heat) chose to visit New Orleans first.

Her relations with Al pursued a normal course—normal in such
circumstances, that is—to the goal of a joint habitation. She was completely fascinated by the robust ever-smiling guide, and he, though not very much attracted at first, was sensibly influenced when he discovered how much money she had. They were married a fortnight after their first meeting.

She told Al, in great and ever-recurrent detail, about her life in Indiana, and for some time he found her stories interesting. He made jokes about her dead husband that the richness of his smile greatly enlivened, and they laughed very happily together about the poor man's shortcomings. The woman, for a little while, was vastly pleased by her new life, laughed with clumsy gaiety, and was proud of her enterprise in going to New Orleans. She acknowledged its appeal.

She vaguely apprehended in the unfamiliar southern city a life richer and more satisfying than the life in northern towns, and in the French Market, to which she returned again and again, she found a symbol of its natural wealth. She was enraptured by the multitude of fruits, their colours and their smells, and to hear the incomprehensible accent of the Acadian farmers satisfied her vestigial feeling for romance.

Not for several weeks did she realise that Al had married her for her money. At first she was liberal with it, but as his demands grew heavier and more frequent—he was unlucky as a gambler, and misfortune made him reckless—she began to grumble, grow fretful, and was disinclined to subsidise his unprofitable interest in poker and craps. They quarrelled with increasing frequency, and the woman was sometimes frightened, sometimes angry, to see that, however violent were Al's words, however fierce his voice, a smile of apparent geniality invariably accompanied them. In the heat of his wrath it twisted and curved his face into a semblance of gay good humour, and his high bald forehead gave him the parti-coloured look of a circus clown, so that his whole appearance suggested a brutal mockery.

His demands for money were always successful in the end. He either frightened her into giving it, or cajoled her. If he had had a few drinks he found it easy to woo her, and to flavour his wooing with the winning jocularity of their early acquaintance; but when he was quite sober he usually bullied her into giving him what he wanted. She grew sullen again, whimpered and nagged in a querulous way, and developed a protective taste for gin.

After a year of marriage her money had nearly gone, and Al was eager to get rid of her. She clung to him with tenacity and cunning, however. The desperate fear of being cast off, and left alone, quickened her wits and enabled her to see through all his attempted schemes and devices. She threatened to become as immovable as his smile.