The Goose Girl and Other Stories (35 page)

They hated each other very thoroughly. Her fatness, her limpet-hold of him, her shiftlessness, her querulous voice that constantly reproached him with wasting her fortune, quickened Al's hatred for her; while she hated him for robbing her of wealth, for mocking her, for making her dependent on him, and for the inhuman fixity of his meaningless smile.

Their quarrels became more and more violent, and the woman lived in a state of fear that was presently justified. For one night Al struck her with a poker, and the sight of her sprawling on the floor, with blood on her face, roused in him the lust to kill. He hit her again and again, with increasing savagery. Her screams faded into moaning, and still, with desperate hands, she tried to ward off his blows. Through the branching guard of her arms, her stretched and despairing fingers—through the darkening mist of unconsciousness, she saw his inhuman smile as the mask of murder.

That was the story I made. When it was done—I had left
lacunae
to be filled in later with description and some conversation, but the whole frame was complete—I returned to bed with a pleasant feeling of accomplishment soothing my brain, and slept for the few remaining hours of darkness.

I woke to the whirring of the ceiling-fan. It was still hot, and through my window, that was higher than any neighbouring building, I looked out at the great arc of the Mississippi, walled in with wharves and warehouses, overhung with a huge dense canopy of lustrous mist. I rang for some tea, and when it came I read the story I had written.

My pleasant feeling of accomplishment quickly vanished, for it seemed very bad. The hour of conception is seldom critical, but in the light of morning I discovered the situation to be trite, the psychology superficial, and the device of the unchanging smile—founded though it was on actual observation—appeared unnecessarily melodramatic. I admitted then that I knew very little, except from novels, about middle-aged women who lived in such states as Indiana and Ohio, and suffered from repression of their spiritual, emotional, or physical requirements.

I knew little of them in fact, and I had never found the idea of them sufficiently interesting to build up inductive theories that might present an appearance of persuasive actuality. Except for the soporific effect of its composition the story was a failure. At any rate I was neither interested nor convinced when I re-read it, and without hesitation or regret I tore it up and threw the fragments into a wastepaper-basket.

My friend arrived about midday, and we left that afternoon on our long journey across the continent. I thought no more about Al and the woman from Indiana—my exercise in fiction had clouded their reality for me—until, months later, a newspaper brought home to me, with considerable emphasis, their actual existence.

I was living in San Francisco at the time, and among the few unworthy things in that magnificent city are its newspapers. They are vulgar, sensational, and except for their criminal reports quite untrustworthy. But they handle crime with circumstance and authority. My attention was attracted by a headline that read ‘New Orleans Hatchet Murder'. The story was illustrated with a couple of photographs, one of which I immediately recognised by a large and seemingly jovial smile. The other was hardly so distinctive, for the woman's expression was unfamiliar and a little unexpected.

I read the account of the murder with some excitement, for, in spite of the dislike I had conceived for my story, and the lack of conviction I found in it, several of my surmises had been correct. The woman had been a widow. After an unhappy married life she had gone to New Orleans on holiday and speedily fallen in love with the smiling guide. Al had married her for her money. He was a confirmed gambler. As soon as her fortune was spent their relations had become unfriendly, and on several occasions the neighbours had been alarmed by the violence of their quarrels.

So far I had been right, and yet I was glad that I had destroyed my version, my prophecy, of their tragic story; for now it became more obvious than ever that I knew little—that I knew nothing indeed—about women who had been thwarted, repressed, and emotionally starved in small mid-western towns. My ignorance was here made manifest, my main induction brutally demolished.

For Al had not murdered the woman. She had murdered him.

Bertran De Salars, lord of Caraman and Salars, a Poor Knight of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, said to his wife Jehane, ‘There is in my mind no smallest doubt of your honesty, nor must you think that what I am now about to do can ever be regarded as an insult to you, as a reflection on your character, or an indication of my lessening esteem. I am afraid it will be necessary for you to take off all your clothes.'

With some bitterness in her voice the Lady Jehane answered, ‘If you do not doubt my honesty I cannot see why you should take such precautions to keep me honest as make it seem that good behaviour is contrary to my intentions.'

‘You are a woman,' said Bertran mildly.

‘It is late in the day to reproach me with that,' said Jehane. ‘I think you have been glad of it once or twice, and now to blame me for what was God's will and has been your pleasure is mere petulance, and not worthy of a knight who proposes to venture his body for the rescue of God's holy city from the Saracens, since God in His wisdom made Eve as well as Adam, and said no word to Adam whereby he should think it right to reproach her with the nature and condition established in her to further His purpose of comforting Adam with an helpmeet and a lover. Still less did He give man warrant, in that garden where warrant was given for so much, to load a woman with chains and put padlocks on her when he went abroad on errands of his own choosing.'

‘You are overwrought,' said Bertran, ‘and so you fall into a torrent of words without perceiving to what shoal of fallacy they bear you. For it was not God but the Serpent who gave to Eve that part of her nature which, in these wicked and degenerate times, appears to dominate all the rest. Nor do I believe that even the Serpent would so have worked upon her had he properly foreseen the future. In Eden there was no other man save Adam, but now there are men walking in every field. And since it is woman's part, as you have said, to be a helpmeet and a lover, man must of his own wit—that God gave him—devise means whereby his wife shall love and help him only, and not squander her mercies on all the world.—You must take off your shift as well, my dear.'

‘There then!' said Lady Jehane, and passionately threw the garment from her. Her cheeks were bright red, from modesty a little and from indignation a great deal, and so hot was her blood that the March wind, blowing lustily through the tower window, chilled her not at all but merely tempered her anger.

‘You are very beautiful,' said Bertran.

‘Keep your mind on the Sepulchre,' said Lady Jehane.

‘My thought is fixed on it and my heart is ever grieved for its present unhappy state,' said Bertran. ‘I do not think you will find the chain uncomfortable, and the links are so smoothly worked that they cannot chafe you. The padlock, I admit, is somewhat heavy, but were it lightly made it could not be secure.'

‘My heart was light, yet my love for you lay safely in it,' said Lady Jehane.

‘I shall be gone three years,' said Bertran, ‘and every month of those years the temptation of benevolence will assail you, pricking of the flesh will stir your woman's wish to give, and voices in your blood will call as dry earth calls loudly for the piercing rain . . .'

‘No, no!' cried Jehane. ‘I am your wife, faithful to you and desirous of no other man.'

‘You are a woman,' said Bertran, ‘and I shall be gone three years.'

Then he put round her waist the girdle that was called the Crusader's Belt—since many knights and noblemen so guarded their wives from shame and even, they hoped, imprudent thoughts while they, far off, battled with the infidel for Christ's tomb and captured city—and when he had adjusted the chain so that it lay close to her side, and yet not so close as to cause discomfort, he fastened it with a heavy padlock, locking that with a key, and tied the key to a cord that he put about his neck.

‘This I shall call your heart's key,' said Bertran, ‘and it shall lie against the beating of my own heart.'

But Jehane made no answer. She put on her clothes again with abrupt and trembling movements, and in her bearing was a muted wildness. She stood by the narrow window, high in the round grey wall of the tower, and looked at the liberty of earth beyond her. Clouds rolled or swam in open sky; the wind leapt freely through black branches flushed green at their myriad tips with buds half-opened; a hawk poised, trod empty space, and stooped; lambs leapt with ungainly joy in tilted fields—but Lady Jehane, hands pressed to waist, felt under her fingers the hard steel chain, and her body shrank within its hold, and beneath its weight her strength grew weak. She breathed harshly through open mouth,
and heard only as some unmeaning noise the farewell her lord was speaking.

She gave him her hand to kiss, but her hand was cold, her head averted.

‘I shall not be happy till Jerusalem is girt with Christian steel as you are girt,' said Bertran.

‘Ah, poor city!' cried Jehane.

‘Poor city indeed,' said Bertran, ‘and that is why we must ride to its relief.'

From her window Jehane looked down and saw the horsemen stiffen to obedience when her lord came out to them. At his word they mounted and rode from the courtyard. Women followed, clamorous at their horses' heels, children shrilly whooped, and those with a better understanding as noisily wept. When the Crusaders had forded the river, splashing through bright shallow water, they turned southwards and rode in file. Bertran waited by the ford till they had crossed. Then he turned to his castle and saluted Lady Jehane—though he could no longer see her, because she had turned away from her window to sit on a little stool and crouch there like an old woman, thinking nothing whatever about the perils and discomfort to which her lord was riding, but very bitterly concerned with her own misery.

The lord of Caraman and Salars sighed and shook his head in a wistful movement that consorted badly with his military appearance, with the short manly beard he wore in compliance with Templar custom, and indeed with the Templar tradition to waste no time on topics of sentiment. But though he knew Jehane to be unhappy, and though the knowledge grieved him, he comforted himself with the assurance that he had acted wisely and for the ultimate benefit of both himself and his wife. He patted his brown surcoat, with the great red cross on it, and felt beneath it her heart's key. ‘She is safe,' he thought, and putting spurs to his horse cantered to overtake his troop.

For a week of tedious days the Lady Jehane maintained a demeanour that to her household appeared the perfection of widowed grief. She was listless, she would not eat, her cheeks were pale and her eyes were red, she was irritable when spoken to, and would burst into tears to atone for her unkindness. ‘Ah!' said her servants and her friends, ‘what desire she has for that Bertran with his Templar's beard, his heavy speech, and his concern for this matter of the Sepulchre! Who would have thought that such a man could blow love's flame so hot, and leave so desolate a hearth behind him?'

But the truth was that Jehane never gave a thought to her lord except in the way of anger against his stupidity. Under a seeming
gaiety and lightness of manner she was in reality extremely virtuous, and though she delighted in the society of troubadours and others who spoke much about the art of love, she had never felt the slightest inclination to abandon herself to its illicit practice. To be loved by Bertran was rather different, of course, though even his embraces, despite the favouring circumstance of the Church's blessing, had really given her very little pleasure. And love unconsecrated was mere bestiality.

That Bertran could think of her yielding to brutish heat like a heifer in the fields or some gap-toothed peasant in a barn! That was pride-shattering, that broke her heart as though her heart had been herself in a mirror broken by a stone. And then there was the intolerable burden of the chain, ever present, printing her side with its abominable links, and by its presence fixing her mind on the lewdness it prohibited. She had no wish to think of evil, but the chain held her to thoughts of evil as surely as it bound her to continence. ‘It makes me a slave, it makes me an animal,' she thought. It was moreover extremely uncomfortable.

And then one morning Jehane was wakened by the amorous voice of the troubadour Simon Vidal singing an alba, or morning song, to her sister Maulfry, a laughing handsome girl to whom such flattery was often paid. The alba was a passionate complaint against the intrusive sun, that drove back the friendly dark and with cruel fingers tore lovers from their lovers' arms.

So coldly blows the wind of dawn

Upon a naked heart,

sang the troubadour.

‘It sounds quite sincere and convincing,' thought Jehane. ‘Someone who knew nothing of our customs might well believe that he had really spent the night in Maulfry's arms and was singing out of uncontrollable grief at parting from her. But he has probably given several days to the composition of so charming a lyric, and was wakened by his servant just in time to get up and sing it so that the sun might rise on its last notes.'

Vidal sang another verse. Though shrill with pain his voice retained the loveliness of conscious art, and the melody was plucked with proficient yearning from the strings of his lute:

I flee before the sharp-edged light

Towards another dark;

How cold becomes the world at dawn—

Cover your naked heart!

‘I wonder!' thought Jehane. ‘That last verse seems to have a more personal note than is usual, though of course many troubadours make their songs provocative enough, and try to give the impression that even more has happened than they are willing to tell. But nobody really believes them when they are like that, and it would be a pity indeed if people did believe them, and so forced them to speak the truth, for you can't make much poetry out of truth alone or compose a song by merely saying what actually occurred. And yet I feel rather anxious about Maulfry, for there was certainly a lot of feeling in Vidal's alba, and she is brave enough for anything. Perhaps he did spend the night in her room!'