The Goose Girl and Other Stories (13 page)

‘
O Sandy, dinnaye mind,' quo' she,

‘When ye gart me drink the brandy,

When ye yerkit me owre among the broom,

And played me houghmagandy!'

‘It's better among the broom than in the Meadows on a cauld winter night, or up against the wall of Greyfriars Kirk with a drunken Aussie seven foot high,' cried Mima Bird.

‘Ay, but they'd money to spend, had the Aussies,' said old Rebecca, ‘and faith, they spent it.'

‘It was a fine war while it lasted,' sighed Mrs Hogg, whose husband, for three good years, had been more use to the Black Watch than he had ever been to her.

‘The boys did well enough,' said Kitty, ‘but the generals and the high heid yins were a pack of jordan-heidit losingers.' And she thought, sadly and lovingly, of Sir Hector McOstrich, who would have shown them how to win battles had not shame, not war, untimely killed him. But far-off thoughts could not long endure the loud immediacy of her cummers, whose laughter grew more frequent, whose tales and jolly memory became with every passing minute more rich and lively and delectable. Now and again their laughter would wake even the corn-fed hens to responsive clucking and scratching; and in the smoky light of a dingy lamp the coarse and weather-beaten cheeks of the six old women, their wrinkled eyes and creasy necks, were lovely with a life invincible. The air was full of the rich odours of beer and stout, and ever and anon its heavy layers would lift and waver before the genial shock of a
great crackling belch. Kitty gave them another dram, and thick slices of black bun.

‘If whisky was a river, and I was a duck,

O whisky! Johnny!

I'd dive to the bottom and I never would come up,

O whisky for my Johnny!'

sang old Rebecca. ‘When that man I was married on, and a hog-eyed lurdan he was,' she said, ‘would come home from sea, he was so thick with salt it would fill you with thirst to smell him half-way up the stairs.'

‘You must have robbed a bank to give us a party like this,' said Mrs Crumb. ‘It beats the High Commissioner's garden-party at Holyrood just hollow. Why, we've drink to every hand, and the very best of drink at that, but there, so they tell me, the ministers' wives are fair tumbling over each other, and tearing each other's eyes out, to get to the eatables and the drinkables, and them nothing but lemonade and ha'penny cakes.'

‘It's the very best party I ever was at,' said Mrs Hogg.

‘It's the only one I've ever been to,' said Mrs Smiley, and that was a lie, but she thought it was true and began to cry, and got another dram to stop her.

So the evening wore on, and by half-past eleven there was nothing left in the glasses but dry feathers of froth, nothing in the bottles but a remembering air. By then, however, it was time to go out and join the multitude, coming from all directions, that was crowding the pavement before St Giles and filling the night with a valedictory noise. These were the common people of Scotland, come to tread underfoot, as bitter ashes, their lost hopes of the Old Year, its miseries they had survived, and to welcome the New Year with hope inexpugnable and confidence that none could warrant and none defeat. The procession of the months would give them neither riches nor wisdom, beauty nor holiness, but under every moon were many days of life, and life was their first love and their last. So the bells rang loudly as they might, the little black bottles were offered to friend and stranger—for all were brothers out of the same unwearying and shameless womb, and many were drunk enough to admit the relationship—hands were held in a circle by unknown hands, songs were sung, and a boisterous dance was trodden. The New Year was made welcome like a stranger in the old days of hospitality, though none knew whether he was whole or sick, or loyal or lying.

Now when the old women, who had spent such a fine evening with
Kitty, came out into the night, the cold air beat on their foreheads and made worse confusion of their befuddled minds, so that four of them lost control of their legs and nearly all cognisance of the world about them. Mrs Smiley lay in the gutter and slept, and Mrs Hogg, lying curiously across a barrel, slept also. Mrs Crumb, walking in a dwaum, clung to the arm of a kind policeman, and old Rebecca, having bitten the hand of an officer of the Salvation Army, vanished in the darkness of a near-by close. But Kitty and Mima Bird staggered valiantly along and came near enough to St Giles to be caught in the crowd and to join their cracked voices in song, to lurch bravely in the dancing, and to crow their welcome to the infant year.

It was late the next morning when Kitty woke on her dirty and disordered bed. Her boots had made it muddy, her broken bonnet lay on the pillow beside her. How she had reached home she could not remember, nor did she worry her aching head to try. Her mouth was parched and sour, her eyes smarting, her stomach queasy. She lay for a long time before she had the strength or courage to move, and then agonisingly sat up, her head splitting beneath a great jolt of pain, and wretchedly set her feet to the floor. She groped among the debris of the feast, holding bottle after bottle with shaking hands to the dim grey square of window to see if any sup remained. But they were all as empty as though a hot wind of the desert had dried them, till at last, hidden by the greasy valance of the bed, she found one that held—O bliss beyond words!—a gill of flat beer. This she drank slowly and with infinite gratitude, and then, taking off her boots and putting her bonnet in a place of safety, she returned to bed. ‘What a nicht wi' Burns!' she murmured, and fell asleep.

In the middle of the night she woke with a raging thirst. Headache and nausea had gone, but her whole body, like a rusty hinge, cried for moisture. Yet water was no good to her. She filled her rumbling belly with it, and it lay cold and heavy in her stomach and never penetrated the thirsty tissues. Her tongue was like the bark of a dead tree, her mouth was a chalk-pit, her vitals were like old dry sacks. Never before had she known such thirst. It seemed as though drought had emptied her veins, as rivulets to dry in the high noon of summer, and her bowels resembled the bleached and arid canvas of a boat that has drifted many days beneath the parching pitiless sun of Capricorn. In this agony, in this inward and ever-increasing Sahara, she lay till morning, while her very thoughts changed their direction with a creak and a groan.

But when the time came for it to open, she went to The Hole in the Wall and pleaded with James Campbell for a little credit, that she might save her life with a quart or two of beer. He, however,
refused to let her have a single drop, not a sparrow's beakful, till she had paid into his hands, on the following Friday, her Old Age pension and her ten shillings from young Mr McOstrich. Then, he said, out of pure Christian kindliness he would let her drink a pint or so on consideration of her pledging to him another week's income. Nor could he be moved from this cruel and tyrannous decision.

It seemed to Kitty, as she walked home, that her body at any moment might crumble into dust and be blown away. She opened her mouth to suck in the wind and the rain, but the wind changed in her throat to a hot simoom, and choked her with a sandstorm of desire for the slaking gold and cool foam of bitter beer. She sat in her dark room gasping for assuagement, and tormented by the vision and the gurgling noise of ale cascading into glass. The marrow dried in her bones.

But despite the unceasing torture she would not yield to the temptation to beg sixpence or a dram, supposing they had it, from her friends. To sorn like a tinker on those whom she had so lately entertained like a queen was utterly impossible. Her spirit was too proud to stoop so low for comfort. Her torment must continue. She had nothing to sell, nothing that anyone would conceivably buy, not even her hens, for they were long past laying and too thin to be worth the plucking. She was shipwrecked, and she must endure till time should rescue her.

But she had not so long to wait for relief as she feared, for about six o'clock in the evening, when The Hole in the Wall was open again for those who had money, her hens began clacking and chacking as though they were mad, and anyone who had been there might have seen Kitty's head fall to one side, and one hand slide stiffly from the arm of her chair. She was dead, and it was thirst that had killed her. Thirst had sucked out the vital essence of her life, and left nothing but dry tubes and a parched frame behind. Her body was dead and as dry as a powdery sponge in a chemist's shop.

Some time later her soul felt better, though not yet at ease, when she found herself walking along Death's Road to the worlds beyond this world. She was still thirsty, but not agonised with thirst. She was worried by the flies and the midges on the lower part of the road, and she was angry to find herself dead; for she had enjoyed being alive. But she kept bravely on her way, knowing the proper thing to do, and she felt exceedingly scornful of the innumerable travellers who grumbled at stones in the way—for it was not a motor-road—and complained about the lack of sign-posts, and sulkily lay down in the shadow of a hedge to wait for a bus that would never come.

The road climbed slowly round the side of a hill whose top was lost in a luminous mist. After a few hours Kitty became reconciled to death, and trudged on with growing curiosity. The farther she went the lonelier the road became, till for a mile or two she saw no one at all. Then, at a fork in the road, she found a group of some twenty people, very well dressed for the most part, who were discussing which way they should go. For on the left hand the road led downhill to a valley shining in the sun, but on the right it climbed steeply and narrowed in a few hundred yards to a mountain track. The majority of the disputing travellers favoured clearly the low road, but a dubious minority furrowed their brows and looked without relish at the upward path. The debate came to an end as Kitty drew near to them. A well-bred female voice, like a ship's bell in the night, exclaimed: ‘The idea is absurd. As though such a wretched little path could lead to anything or anywhere!' ‘Unless to a precipice,' added a tired young man. And the party, with scarcely a glance at Kitty, turned downhill with resolute steps or a shrug of the shoulders.

‘Tyach!' said Kitty, and went the other way.

The path she took was not unlike the little road that leads to Arthur's Seat. The resemblance comforted her, and so did the mist, which was like a Scots haar with the sun coming through it. The track bent and twisted and crossed a depression between three hills. It rose into the mist. She walked for a long time in a sunny vapour, and lost her breath, and grew thirsty again.

Then the view cleared, and on the forefront of a great plateau she came to a high wall, with a tall white gate in it, and beside the gate a house with an open door, two bow-fronted lower windows, and three upper ones, from the centre of which jutted a green holly bush. So Kitty knew it was a tavern, and taking no notice of the ivory gate in the wall she walked gladly in, and rapped on the bar. But when she saw who came to answer the summons, she was so astounded and so abashed that she could not speak, though a moment before she had known very well what she meant to say.

It was a lady with high-piled golden hair who came to serve her—but the gold was dim, the colours of her dress were faded (it had been fashionable when King Edward VII was crowned), her mouth had forgotten laughter—and Kitty, seeing not only all that had changed but that which was unchanged, knew her at once.

‘Well,' said the lady, ‘and what can I give you?'

‘Oh, your ladyship!' stammered Kitty, and twisted her dirty old hands in joy and embarrassment.

Then, before either could speak again, a tall thin man came in
through the outer door with a basket on his arm. He had a nose like a hawk's beak, a pair of fine moustaches like the wings of a hawk, he wore a deer-stalker's cap and an old Norfolk jacket, and the basket on his arm held a loaf of bread, a beef-bone, and some vegetables. He put the basket on a table and murmured to the lady with the dimmed golden hair, ‘A customer, my dear? Things are looking up, aren't they?'

‘Sir Hector!' said Kitty in a trembling voice.

But though she recognised them, they did not remember her, for she had lived longer than they had, and life had used her inconsiderately. It was only after long explanation, after much exclamation, that they knew her, and saw faintly in her dissipated features the sweet young lines of Kitty of the Burnside. Sir Hector was visibly distressed. But Kitty, giving him no time to speak his pity, indignantly asked, ‘And what are you doing here, in a pub at Heaven's gate, who never soiled vour hands with work of anv kind on earth below? Is there no respect

‘Well,' said Kitty, ‘it all began with a Hogmanay party in Baxter's Close in the Canongate . . .'

‘That's enough,' said St Peter. ‘We want none of your kind here.' And he shut the door in her face.

Now having been refused admission, Kitty's curiosity became overwhelming, and she made up her mind to enter Heaven by hook or crook. So she walked up and down muttering angrily, till she thought of a trick that might beat St Peter's vigilance, and the following morning she knocked again on the ivory door.

St Peter frowned angrily when he saw who it was, but before he could speak, Kitty exclaimed, ‘There's an auld friend of yours in the pub ootbye that's speiring for you, and would like you to go and have a crack with him.'

‘What's his name?' asked St Peter.

‘I just canna mind on,' Kitty answered, ‘but he's a weel-put-on man with whiskers like your own.'

‘It's not like any friend of mine to be spending his time in a public house,' said St Peter.

‘You wouldna deny an auld friend because he likes his glass, would you?'

Now at that moment Kitty had a stroke of luck, for beyond the wall a cock crew loud and piercingly, and Kitty said quickly, ‘You'll remember that once before you cried out you didna ken a man you kent full well. You'll not be wanting to make the same mistake again, I'm thinking?'