The Goose Girl and Other Stories (5 page)

I had gone out with my gun—the fine piece by Holland—to try and shoot a late hare, and after following tracks in the snow for an hour or two I had got a couple. I was on my way home again when I saw, by the burnside a few hundred yards from the house, the child in her blue cap and her little blue coat. The burn, bank-high, was running strongly, and I hurried towards her with a sudden feeling, as of a man caught among thorns, of nervousness and annoyance that she should be there with no one to look after her.

She stood with her back to me, in her favourite position, her hands clasped behind her, and not until I had come within a few yards of her did I see the gander. He was afloat in a little smooth backwater of the burn, but as soon as he caught sight of me he came ashore, his broad feet ungainly on the snow but moving fast, and I thought he was going to attack me. The child turned and I called to her: ‘Come here, Nell! Come here at once!'

But she stayed where she was and the gander came up behind her and opened his wings so that she stood by his breast within a screen of feathers as hard as iron and as white as the snow beyond them. It must have been the whiteness of the fields, with the bright haze of the sun upon them, that dazzled me and deluded me into thinking that the gander had grown to three times or four times his proper size. His neck seemed a column of marble against the sky, his beak was bronze, and his black eyes reflected the sun like shafts from a burning-glass. A low rumbling noise, like the far-off surge of the sea on a pebble-beach, came from his swollen throat.

I'm not a coward and I couldn't have been frightened of a bird. It was snow-sickness, I suppose, that set my brain swimming and undid the strength of my knees, so that I thought I was going to faint. I remember seeing the same sort of thing happen to a soldier in Italy, in the mountains in winter-time. He was a friend of my own, a big fellow as tall as myself. He stumbled and fell, and the strength went out of him. We thought he had gone blind, but after we got him into a house and had given him some brandy, he was all right.

When I came to myself and knew what I was doing, I was on my hands and knees, crawling, and my hands were on fire with the friction of the snow. I had to crawl another twenty or thirty yards before I felt fit to stand up, and then I staggered and stumbled as if I were drunk. I wasn't far from home by then, and I rested for a while in the barn.

When I felt better I went into the kitchen. The child was there already, and as soon as I came in she ran towards me, and pushing me into a chair climbed on to my knee. She began to pat my face and play with my hair, as if trying to comfort me.

Presently I went out again, and found my gun and the two hares where I had dropped them. There was no sign of the gander. They were big hares, both of them, and I took them into the back-kitchen and got a basin, and cleaned and skinned them. But all the time I was thinking: Well, this is the end of pretence. There's no point or purpose in denial now. But what am I going to do?

The women were on the other side, so I couldn't talk to them. Lydia was in love with me, as I with her—there was no doubt about that—and the old woman liked me well enough; but now I knew the dividing-line between us, and I couldn't cross it. But I had to talk to someone.

John Norquoy wouldn't do. I had made a confession to him before, and it was too soon to make another. Nor would he believe me if I did. I had no great faith in the schoolmaster either, but I had to do something, say something to someone, and after tea I set out for his house, walking heavily through the snow, and if he was surprised to see me he didn't show it, but made me welcome. He had spent three or four idle days, with only a dozen children able to come to school, and in his own way he too may have been glad of a chance to talk for a while. His wife left us to ourselves.

I didn't know how to begin, but he helped me. He had been reading a book whose author was trying to prove that modern war was the result of conflicting demands for oil; and he, full of brand-new information, was ready to argue that war had always had economic causes, and no other causes. I didn't believe him, and said so. It was ideas that made war, I said. If an economist went to war, with material gains in view, it was because he was a bad economist, a quack and a charlatan; for any practical economist knows that war is likely to waste far more than it can win. ‘But if men believe in ideas, of power and glory, or religious ideas, or even social ideas,' I went on, ‘they may go to war for the simple reason that idealists don't count the cost of what they want. They go to war, that is, in despite of the economic arguments against it. And they're always against it.'

We talked away on those lines, getting warmer all the time, and the schoolmaster, really enjoying himself now, went back into history, back and back, till he had proved to his own satisfaction that the Peloponnesian War was due entirely to the imperialism of Athens,
and the determination of the Athenians to brook no interference with their mercantile marine.

‘And did Agamemnon and Menelaus,' I asked him, ‘go to war to win the right of exploiting mineral resources in the windy plains of Troy?'

‘If we really knew anything about the Trojan War,' he said, ‘we should probably have to admit that that indeed was the cause of it; or something very like that.'

‘It's not the generally accepted cause,' I said.

‘According to the fable,' he answered, ‘the purpose of the war was to recover, from the person who had carried her off, the erring wife of Menelaus. And who was she? Zeus, who never existed, is said to have visited a fictitious character called Leda in the guise of a swan, and the result of their impossible union was a legendary egg out of which a fabulous being named Helen was incredibly hatched. Helen, says the story, grew to miraculous beauty, married Menelaus, and ran away with Paris. You can't seriously regard a woman who wasn't even a woman, but only a myth, as the cause of a war.'

‘It lasted for ten years,' I said.

‘I've been talking history,' he said. ‘You really shouldn't try to answer me with mythology.'

‘How does a myth begin?' I asked.

‘How does a novelist go to work?' he demanded.

‘By drawing on his experience, I suppose.'

He got up impatiently and fetched a bottle of whisky and two glasses from the sideboard. Then he went out for a jug of water, and when he came back I said, ‘What's worrying me is this. If a man discovers something within the scope of his own life that will eventually be a cause of war between nations, what can he do about it?'

‘What could such a thing be?' he asked.

‘I can't explain.'

‘But it's impossible,' he said. ‘War hasn't a simple origin or a single cause that you can take in your hand like a trophy to be fought for in a tournament. You have to consider the whole economy of the rival countries, their geographical situation, the growth of their population—'

‘And their ideas,' I said. ‘Their leaders' desire for power, or a new religion, or a woman.'

‘You're going back to your myth,' he said.

‘You fought in one war, I fought in another. My experience of war is that you fight for five years, and at the end of it you see your best friend killed beside you, and you're glad—you're glad,
by God!—that it's he who's dead, and not you. I don't want another war.'

‘Well,' he said, ‘whatever starts the next war, it won't be a woman. You can put that fear out of your head.' ‘I'm not so sure,' I said.

The argument went on for a long time, and gave me no satisfaction. But talking did me good, and we drank a lot of whisky. When I got home I felt calmer, but very old, as if I were a character in a Greek play who saw the enormous tragedy that was coming, and could do nothing but wait for it, and then abide it.

Lydia and her mother were in bed, and I got a lantern from the back-kitchen. I lighted it and went to the stable. Meg, the old black mare, was twenty-seven or twenty-eight, and we dared not let her lie down in her stall for fear she could never get up again, so every night I put a broad canvas sling under her belly, to take the weight off her legs, and she slept standing. She woke as I went in, whinnying softly, and turned her head to watch me.

I stood on a wheelbarrow in the empty stall beside her, and reaching to the top of the wall, where the rafters go in, took down what I had hidden there, and never looked at since, nearly three years before. I had made a parcel of it, with string and brown paper, and now it was covered with thick cobweb. I brushed off the web and cut the string. For a moment or two I held in my hands the cigarette-box—covered with a fine Florentine leather stamped in gold, that I had taken from one of those little shops on the Ponte Vecchio—and then I opened it.

Inside lay the broken shell of a big white egg. I fitted the larger fragments together, and judged it to have been about seven inches long and rather more than four inches in diameter at the widest part.

That was what I had picked up, after coming home from my father's funeral, in the long grass under the ben-room window. It may seem funny to you, but you're not in my position.

Mr G. P. Pomfret was a wealthy man and the centre of as large a circle of friends and relations as the junior partner in a prosperous brewery might reasonably expect to be. But, until he disappeared, he was not famous. Then he became a household word, and the five members of his family—consanguineous, allied, and presumptively allied—who disappeared with him, all earned pages in those indefatigable supplements to our national biography, the Sunday newspapers. For with Mr Pomfret there also vanished Mrs Pomfret his wife; Lt.-Commander Hugo Disney and Mrs Disney (
née
Pomfret); Miss Joan Pomfret; and Mr George Otto Samways, her fiancé.

The circumstances of their joint occultation were remarkable, and as the geographical environment was sufficiently and yet not immeasurably remote from the more advertised holiday haunts of man, the affair took to itself a halo of romance that was entirely different from the hectic nimbus that ever and again makes some obscure police-court luminous.

It has been said that Mr Pomfret was wealthy. He had inherited a large number of shares in an excellent brewery and with them a sanguine and speculative temperament. His fortune persuaded the members of his family, initial and contributory, readily to accept a certain imperiousness of temper which Mr Pomfret occasionally exhibited; and so when one evening early in June he said, from the top of his dinner-table, ‘I intend, subject to your approval, to take you all with me on a somewhat unusual holiday', his household (including Lt.-Commander Hugo Disney) and the solitary guest (Mr George Otto Samways) accepted the invitation in the manner of a royal command.

‘Where are we going?' asked Joan, adeptly peeling her peach.

‘To Orkney, my dear,' replied Mr Pomfret, and surveyed with benign amusement the expressions of surprise which impinged upon or flitted across the faces of his domestic audience.

Lt.-Commander Disney alone showed no amazement. ‘That's excellent,' he said heartily. ‘I've meant for long enough to go back there.'

Orkney is worthy of some attention. The islands have a romantic appeal as the home of lost races. The Vikings settled there, and before
the Vikings there was a mysterious people, Picts or such, little men who vanished but left many traces of their occupation. At some time Culdee monks from Ireland went there; and went again as silently. Stewart earls ruled the islands like young pagan emperors. When the Great War began the British Fleet chose Scapa Flow, in the heart of the Orkneys, as its headquarters and battle haven. Later the German Fleet also rested there; but at the still bottom, not on the wind-flawed surface of the waters.

It was, however, the excellence of the trout-fishing which led Lt.-Commander Disney to applaud Mr Pomfret's decision. He had spent the less active intervals in three years of naval warfare in Scapa Flow, and had become acquainted with the opportunities of sport which the island lochs offered to a fisherman robust enough to disregard occasional inclemencies of weather. Frequently he had spoken to Mr Pomfret of brown trout and sea trout, praising their strain of fishy pugnacity and the delicate savour of their flesh; praising too the lure of sunny waters under a canopy of brilliant sky all painted with cloud galleons, porpoises and swimming dolphins of cloud, and at evening glorious with the barred crimson and gold, the errant greens, the daffodil hues, the rosy outflung feathers, of the sun sliding bedwards behind the enormous wall of the Atlantic. And these conversations, moving like yeast in Mr Pomfret's brain, had finally given rise to this momentous decision.

It is unnecessary to consider the manner of the journey north, which was complicated. Mr Pomfret had rented for two months a large house called Swandale, in one of the seaward parishes in the northern part of the Mainland of Orkney; it was considered advisable to take, as well as his family, a motor car, his chauffeur, and three maids. The first week or so of their residence passed pleasantly enough. They were enraptured with the scenery, the vast stretches of ever-changing sea, the majestic cliffs loud with the ceaseless activity of gulls; they watched the diving gannets, the ludicrous earnest puffins, the graceful terns, and hysterical oyster-catchers. They were delighted with the shy and independent islanders. They enjoyed the novelty of peat fires blazing in an open hearth. Lt.-Commander Disney and Mrs Disney fished with notable success in the neighbouring lochs. Mr Pomfret walked and inquired diligently into local traditions and history. And Mrs Pomfret read the works of Lord Lytton, to which she was ineradicably addicted. Joan Pomfret and Otto Samways occupied themselves in ways apparently satisfactory, and certainly remote from the rest of the family.

The holiday would probably have continued on these pleasant
and harmless lines had it not been for the imaginative temperament (excited by love and romantic surroundings) of Miss Joan Pomfret. It suddenly occurred to her that they were rapidly approaching Midsummer Day.