The Goose Girl and Other Stories (14 page)

At that St Peter's face grew dark red with rage and shame. But he tucked up his gown and went swiftly out and over to the inn, leaving the gate of Heaven open. And Kitty, as soon as his back was turned, scuttled inside.

It seemed to her that Heaven had a rather deserted look. She had expected to see well-dressed crowds and a fine air of prosperity and well-being. She had hoped to associate with lords and ladies, or at least with wealthy people of the kind that lived in Heriot Row and did their expensive shopping in Princes Street. But the only people she saw were almost as shabbily dressed as she was, and even they were few in number.

She stopped and spoke to a mild little man who sat on a green chair beneath a white-flowering tree. ‘The others will have gone for a picnic?' she asked. ‘Or they'll be busy with their choir practice?'

‘There are no others,' he answered. ‘At least, not here. Some of the farther regions, that people of an older birth have chosen, are well
enough populated, but here we are very few in number. So many on earth today have lost their faith . . .'

‘The glaikit sumphs!' said Kitty, and continued her walk, but without much enjoyment. She was saved from boredom, indeed, only by discovering, in the shelter of a little wood, a henhouse with a run attached, in which a score of finely feathered Rhode Island Reds were gravely scratching, their ruddy plumage a very pretty contrast to green leaves and white sand. While Kitty stood watching them with interest and admiration, she was surprised, and somewhat perturbed by the approach of Our Lady and a young woman in a khaki shirt and cotton breeches.

Kitty most reverently curtsied, Our Lady as graciously smiled, and the young woman in the breeches went into the hen run. Presently she reappeared with a dejected look on her face and two small eggs in her hand.

‘Now really,' said Our Lady, ‘that's
most
disappointing. Two eggs today, three yesterday, and four the day before. They're getting worse and worse. I do think you might persuade them to do better than that, Miss Ramsbottom.'

‘I'm giving them the very same feeds that were recommended by the Government College of Dairying and Poultry Management,' said Miss Ramsbottom unhappily.

‘Well, if that doesn't suit them, why not try something else?'

‘But I don't know anything else. We weren't taught anything else in the Government College. It took us so long to learn . . .'

‘You let me look after them, Your Ladyship,' said Kitty. ‘I kept a dozen hens in a back kitchen in Baxter's Close, in the Canongate in Edinburgh, and fed them on anything I could find, or on nothing at all, and they laid like herring-roe for eight or nine years, some of them, till the poor creatures were fairly toom, and nothing could be done with them at all. But with bonny birds like these we'll have eggs dropping all day, like pennies in the plate at a revival meeting.'

‘All right,' said Our Lady, ‘I'll give you a trial and see how you get on. And if there's a choice—though there hasn't been for a long time past—it's the brown eggs that I prefer, especially for breakfast, though the white ones are good enough for omelettes, of course. Now come along, Miss Ramsbottom, and I'll find something else for you to do.'

So Kitty was given work in Heaven, and for several weeks she was happy enough to be looking after such handsome and well-disposed fowls, for under her care they became not merely prolific but regular in their habits. Two circumstances, however, kept her from settling down in whole contentment, one being the lack of congenial company, the
other the fact that in Heaven there was nothing to drink but light wines and beer, and the beer was poor in quality.

She took to wandering far afield, and found that regions more remote from the gate were fairly thickly populated. But many of the inhabitants, to her disgust, were foreigners, and even among those of Scottish or English origin she found few with whom she had much in common. Yet she continued to explore the upper reaches of Heaven, for having met Our Lady she was seized with ambition to encounter God the Father and the Son of Man.

It was after a very long walk that by chance she saw God. He was sitting in a pleached arbour drinking wine with a bald man in doublet and hose, his head the shape of an egg, and another in sombre garments, with a broad bony forehead, untidy thick hair, and a wild mouth. Their voices were loud and magnificent, and a pleasant lightning played about the forehead of God the Father.

‘I wrote your true morality,' said the bald man, ‘when I made Parolles say
Simply the thing I am shall make me live'

‘And I,' said the man with the bony forehead, ‘I rote your pure wisdom in the third movement of my Emperor concerto, when I put the Hero—the Conqueror, the Fool—in the middle of a ring, and fenced him round with dancing countryfolk and laughter that would not stop.'

‘So you're my Moralist, and you're my Philosopher?' said God the Father. ‘And what was I when I said
Let there be light?
Simply the Artist for art's sake?'

‘A pity you hadn't also said
Let there be understanding,'
said the man with the bony forehead.

‘Then would you have robbed poor dramatists of their trade,' said the bald man.

Now this kind of conversation, though it appeared to please its participants, had no interest for Kitty, and without waiting to hear more she went on past the pleached arbour, and came presently to a little rocky foreland in the cliff of Heaven, and looking over the edge she saw something of the world below.

She had never known till then what evil there was upon the earth. But looking down, through the clear light of Heaven, she saw lies and tyranny and greed, misery like a dying donkey in the sand and greed like a vulture tearing its vitals. She saw hunger and heard weeping. She saw a fool in black uniform who had made his own people drunk with lying words and threatened all Europe with war. She saw bestial stupidity consume the horde of humanity like vermin on a beggar's skin. And then she found that she was not
alone on the little foreland, for in a cleft of the rock was the Son of Man, weeping.

So Kitty, in a great hurry to escape unseen, came quickly away from there, and without waiting to look at anything else returned to her henhouse and the comforting plumpness of her Rhode Island Reds. She was hot and leg-weary after her long walk, and very depressed by what she had seen of the farther parts of Heaven. She wanted to sit down in a comfortable chair, and take off her boots, and drink a quart or two of good strong ale. She needed ale, and plenty of it, to soothe and reassure her. But as luck would have it, the beer that night was thin as a postcard, sour as vinegar, and there was very little of it. Kitty lost her temper completely, and let anyone who cared to listen know just what she thought of Heaven and the only brewer—since men brewed their own—who had ever succeeded in swindling his way into it. At dinner time the next day she repeated the whole story, for again the beer was small in quantity and less in quality, a cupful, no more, and little better than swipes.

She rose from the table in fury, and went straight to the gate, which was unattended. She threw it open, and without any feeling of regret heard it slam behind her.

But in the tavern below the wall, with a tankard of their own brewing before her, she soon found good temper again, and told Sir Hector and Lady Lavinia a fine story of the hardships she had had to endure.

‘Not that I wasn't real pleased to be working for Our Lady,' she said, ‘and a fine time
she
had while I was there, with two good brown eggs to her breakfast every morning, but apart from her the company was poor—no gentry at all—and there were sights there that I wouldna care to see again, and talk that made no sense, and the beer was just a disgrace. It's maybe all right for them that like it, and God knows I wouldna say a word against the place, but I think I'll be better suited here, if you'll keep me. I can peel the tatties and scrub the floor and clean your boots, and if you won't grudge me a nip and a pint when my work's done, I'll be far happier here than in ahint that wall of theirs. And I wouldna find it easy to get by yon birkie with the keys again,' she added.

There then, in the inn at Heaven's gate, Kind Kitty found her proper place. There she is still, doing a little work and drinking a good deal, and whomsoever Death takes from this world, whose legs and faith are strong enough for the hillward path, will do well to stop there and drink a pint or two for the good of the house and his own comfort. For Kitty's presence is sure proof that the ale is still good. Had its quality failed she would have gone elsewhere long before now.

Standing Inhumanly tall, on the hill called Ben Bhragie, was the statue to the old Duke. It was a monument to crime, a memorial to greed and folly. In his name and by his authority the happiness of a broad countryside had been laid in ruins, and misery domesticated. Many thousands of people had been robbed of land that was theirs by the right of immemorial usage, and evicted with every circumstance of brutality from the homes their fathers had built and they had plenished. Leaving behind them a blazing roof, carrying what they could of their small wealth, encumbered by the aged and the weak and by crying children, the stricken Highlanders had been driven from their native valleys like refugees before a barbaric invader. Yet no foreign power was hostile to them. Their enemy was their own chieftain. In nine years fifteen thousand of them had been turned out of their snug inland farms and exiled on a barren coast where, from weedy rocks and a sour turf, they might compete for a starved living with coneys and gulls and harsh weather.

Had they been savage and debased, their fate would still have been pitiful. Had their hills been the home of bandits, their villages of corruption, such punishment might still be thought severe. But they had been, on the contrary, a people given equally to virtue and to valour. Peaceful in their private lives, as soldiers serving their chieftain or their king they had been famous for their audacity in attack, for the sternness of their courage in adversity. On their farms they had lived in quiet simplicity, in the field—in France and on the Peninsula—they had won for the Ninety-Third Highlanders a glory more proud than Roman eagles. They had deserved well of all men, even of their enemies, and their enemies indeed remembered them with respect. But their chieftain had betrayed them because they owned land that he coveted. That was their crime. They tilled their farms, and lived on the product of their toil, but he, who was already a leviathan of wealth, made little or no profit out of them. Sheep would pay him better. So he told his agents to drive them out, and bring flockmasters from the south to replace them. That was why his statue was raised so inhumanly tall on Ben Bhragie.

The Castle was set pleasantly among fields. Planted with trees,
they were acquiring the mellow and accomplished appearance of a nobleman's park. The Castle was square, with towers at the corners, but preparations were being made to enlarge it, to add a wing, another tower, and a massive and ornate front. Foundations were being dug for the wing, piles of timber and cut stones were lying about, when the Duke—the son of the statued Duke, and himself now old—came north from London with a duty to discharge. Britain was at war with Russia, and the Queen's army needed men for the Crimea. The Duke was a patriot, and he had promised to recruit some hundreds of his own clansmen. The offer was warmly welcomed by Her Majesty's ministers, for no finer fighting men could be found, and the Duke assured them that they would soon have another battalion to throw against the Russian redoubts.

Hurried preparations for a great recruiting meeting were made in Golspie, a village on the coast, a mile or two south of the Castle, and notices were sent round the neighbouring parishes to warn people of the Duke's presence and apprise them of their duty to attend. These orders were respectfully received, and on the morning appointed at least four hundred men assembled in Golspie, at a place where the street broadened and where two recruiting sergeants were already walking up and down. Tables had been set on trestles, and there were chairs behind them, including a handsome leather-furnished armchair for the Duke. The crowd regarded these arrangements without much apparent emotion. They were quiet and well-behaved, talking together in little groups, and gradually coalescing into a closely packed throng as more and more late-comers arrived, and the pressure grew of women and children on the flanks of the assemblage. These were more inclined to be noisy, calling shrilly to each other in Gaelic, till their menfolk sternly bade them be quiet. Absolute silence lay on the crowd when the Duke arrived.

He came in a carriage drawn by a pair of fine grey horses. His factor was with him, there was an officer wearing long Dundreary whiskers, and a minister of the Church of Scotland who had served his patron well by telling the crofters that eviction from their holdings was an act ordained by God, as a just punishment for their sins, and they must suffer it patiently and without resentment. Other members of the Duke's household, clerks and underfactors, had already arrived, and the recruiting party arranged itself behind the trestle-tables, a sergeant on either flank and the Duke enthroned in the middle.

They became busy with certain matters preliminary to the enlistment of the clansmen. Pens and ink-bottles were set out, piles of attestation papers laid on the table. The factor produced a black
leather bag from which he took several fat bundles of pound-notes securely fastened, and arranged them so that they could be clearly seen. Then he undid a linen bag and poured from it, into a plate on the table, a glittering stream of sovereigns. He whispered a little joke to the minister, who sat beside him, but the minister held up a warning hand, for he saw that the Duke was ready to speak.

The Duke rose slowly, thrusting himself up from the arms of his chair. His voice was husky to begin with. The words, though confident enough, came haltingly. But he gathered strength, and soon was talking with some volubility.