The Goose Girl and Other Stories (15 page)

‘We are confronted with a crisis of great magnitude,' he said, ‘and I have come here, as representative of Her Majesty and as your chieftain, to ask you all, or as many of you as may be able, to help our country, our great country of which we are so proud, in this her hour of need. The situation, with which you are all familiar, is this: we have taken up arms on behalf of a weak country, whose cause is
right,
against a great and powerful country whose only title to consideration is
might.
We are at war with Russia, whose tyrannous and despotic government is a menace to the freedom and independence of every country in Europe. We are fighting on the side of Turkey, because Turkey stands for honour and justice and civilisation and progress. It is essentially a Christian war in which we are engaged. It is a war that will help to rid the world of the recurrent menace of war. Her Majesty, and Her Majesty's ministers, and all of us here today, are lovers of peace, but only of an honourable peace. We would rather die—if necessary—on the field of battle, than live in a state of dishonourable ease, knowing we had abandoned what was right and forfeited the respect and friendship of our Turkish allies. I ask you to enlist, for this just war, in your own regiment, the Ninety-Third Highlanders, whose splendid reputation, known all over the world, was made by the courage and devotion to duty of your fathers and grandfathers. Or if, for any particular reason, you want to join some other regiment, you are at perfect liberty to do so. I may say, however, that my factor will pay the sum of six pounds, over and above the government bounty, to every man who joins the Ninety-Third, or a sum of three pounds to anyone who prefers to join another regiment. This money I am giving, and giving gladly, out of my own purse, as a stimulus to recruiting and because in times like these it behoves all of us to do what we can—though some of you, I know, cannot do very much—in the common cause. Now Major Hatton will read to you the terms of enlistment, and after that the sergeants, or the clerks here, will be ready to take your names. And I hope there will be a very
good response to my appeal, and that Golspie will set an example to the whole country.'

For a few seconds the Duke remained standing, waiting for the applause that was his due. But no cheering rewarded him, no clapping of hands. The crowd, almost motionless, stood in absolute silence. Even the children were quiet. The recruiting party, embarrassed, shuffled in their chairs. The Duke, with brittle coughing, cleared his throat and sat down.

A moment later Major Hatton rose and read, in a dry precise voice, the terms of enlistment. ‘Those of you who intend to join Her Majesty's forces, and I hope that includes nearly all of you, can now give your names either to Sergeant Murray or to Sergeant Rose,' he concluded.

There was no movement in the crowd, none came forward, no one shouted a question. They stood elbow to elbow, pressed close together, their faces void of any expression but mild expentancy. They looked steadily at the Duke and his party, waiting with gentle curiosity for the next hortation, the next move.

The Duke's factor got up and said bluffly, ‘Come, now, who'll be the first? Who's going to show the way and set the pace? What about you, Ross? Or you, Murdo? Wouldn't you like to feel six golden sovereigns in your hand?'

He took a fistful of gold and poured it from one hand to the other. ‘Who's going to take advantage of His Grace's marvellous generosity?' he demanded.

There was no reply. A little shuffling movement went through the crowd, and then they settled again to immobility and silence. The recruiting party began to confer in anxious tones, and the sergeants, obeying Major Hatton's order, went forward to talk with individuals in the throng.

The crowd, as though shaking itself, opened its ranks a little to let the sergeants in. Their red tunics disappeared in the dull hued mass, their feather bonnets shook and wandered above four hundred heads. No hostility was shown them, but whenever they spoke to a man he shrugged his shoulders or turned his back. One of them came out with a shock-headed squinting fellow, who seemed a volunteer, but there was a good deal of laughter at his appearance, and the minister, hurrying forward, told the sergeant to let him go again, for he was the village idiot. Except for him the sergeants had no success.

Once more the Duke rose slowly and began to speak. His voice was angry now. He told them how serious was the situation, how urgently men were needed in the Crimea. He repeated most of his previous
speech, referred again to his bounty, and trembling with indignation declared that their behaviour was such an insult as he had never in his life received. But he would give them one more chance. Who would join the colours? Who were not afraid to be men, and who were simply cowards?

The silence on the crowd seemed to grow more heavy. It lay on them like a roof, and beneath its weight they seemed to contract, to grow in upon themselves. They stood like men made of stone. Even the sound of their breathing was subdued.

The Duke still waited for a forward movement to break their ranks. But no movement came. Then in a passion he shouted, ‘This is the first and only time in history when the men of Sutherland have refused a call to duty! Your fathers and your grandfathers would be ashamed to own you. They were heroes, and you are dastards. Whenever there was danger, wherever there was war, the Highlanders—your brave ancestors—were first against the foe. And do you, their sons, hang back and hold to the skirts of your womenfolk like poltroons? What are you frightened of? Of the enemy? Your fathers faced the world in arms. Are you frightened of getting hurt? You'll be well looked after if you're wounded. Your country will treat you generously and see that you never want. Great Britain doesn't forget those who serve her! Your wives and children will be properly cared for while you're away. I myself will make it my sacred charge to see that no one suffers the smallest hardship whose breadwinner is fighting his country's battles.'

Like a black ripple on the sea, a sound of bitter laughter ran through the crowd. It passed, and silence followed. It passed as quickly as a catspaw of wind, blowing down from the cliffs, will overrun a narrow bay. But brief and small as it was, it disconcerted the Duke, who sat down, heavily and suddenly, and gripped the arms of his chair, and stared at the crowd with some obscure emotion in his soul and in his eyes.

Then an old man came out from the heart of the crowd. It opened slowly, like a dark leaf opening, and he came out and stood in the open space between the men of Sutherland and the recruiting party. He stood straightly and firm on his feet, not a big man, but tall enough to have a look of authority, though his face was lined with sorrow and his eyes were the eyes of a man who had seen disaster more often than triumph. He took off his bonnet—it was old and faded—and spoke in a high clear voice, in the accents of one whose natural talk was the Gaelic, but in words that did not fail him though he had to put his thoughts into English.

‘Your Grace,' he said. ‘We are indeed the sons of our fathers who fought so often for their King, and fought so well that you and all men remember them with pride. We are their sons, I say, and because of that we remember their fate who trusted to your promises, and to the promises of your ancestors. It was near this very place that your maternal grandmother, at forty-eight hours' notice, mustered fifteen hundred men and chose out of them the nine hundred she wanted for the King's service. And they went willingly, as volunteers, because they trusted her, and she would make, I am thinking, the same promises that you have made. But what did they find when they came home again, or when their few survivors came home? They found their fathers and their wives, their sisters and their children and the widows of their comrades, sitting desolate and hungry and homeless on the cold seashore, whom they had left in fine houses, with cattle about them and ploughed fields in the inland glens. They found the good land that was theirs a desolation, a wilderness in the hands of strangers, and no sound in the air but the bleating of sheep, where once they had heard the bagpipe and the clarsach and the women singing. That is what your promises are worth, and that is why they deceive us no longer, because we are wiser than our fathers! Here is Donald Ross, with the mark on his forehead where the blazing beam fell from the burning roof of his mother's house, when your factor drove them out! There is John MacDonald, who lived, he and his family, on a diet of boiled grass and limpets for three long years, because he had been robbed of the farm that was his fathers' farm for six hundred years; and his four men children died of hunger and cold. If you had left them on their land they would have lived, and they would have been the Queen's soldiers, and every man of them might have killed ten Russians apiece! But they are dead, and you cannot enlist them now, though you offer sixty pounds a head for them. Nor will their father go at your command, and for your promise, because he knows what your promise is worth and what your bounty is like. You say the Czar of Russia is a tyrant and a despot, and that may well be the truth. But we in Sutherland say this, that if the Czar of Russia took possession of Dunrobin Castle and of Stafford House next term, we would not expect worse treatment at his hands than we have had at the hands of you and your family for the last fifty years. So go back to Her Majesty and tell her that you have found no men for her service, because you and your servants have driven them away from their hills and their glens, and the few that remain among the ruins and the rubbish of the county will no longer listen to your lying words. Go back to Her Majesty, and say that you have no men left in your
land, but if she wants venison or mutton she can have it in plenty. For it was sheep and deer that you preferred to men, it is sheep that live on all the good land today, and sheep are all you can now command!'

Once or twice during this harangue the Duke had made an effort to interrupt and silence it. But words failed him, or the strength to speak them, and he sat, with a face as white as parchment, and twitching hands, till it came to an end. Then he rose abruptly, staggering against the table so that the sovereigns jingled in their plate, and walked unsteadily to his carriage. He looked at no one, neither at the old man who had spoken so daringly, nor at the men behind him, nor at his own people. His head was bent, his eyes saw nothing but the trodden earth before him. He would not wait for the others, but got into his carriage and was driven at once to the Castle.

Till he was out of sight the crowd was quiet enough. But when he had gone they began to grow more lively. The factor and the minister and Major Hatton were left with the tables to clear, and they hardly knew whether to clear them at once or to wait awhile to see if matters mended. But the factor prudently packed the money, the sovereigns and the pound notes, back into his bag, and made the two sergeants stand in front of him while he did so. Then there was a little laughter, and the children on the outskirts of the crowd began to imitate the bleating of sheep. The women followed suit, and some of the younger men.
Baa-a-a-a-a,
they cried, and laughed, and bleated again.

The minister tried to stop them, shouting angrily, but they bleated in concert, and the air was full of the silly noise of the flocks that had dispossessed them. They followed the recruiting party back to the Castle, baa-ing like shorn ewes. Their dignity was forgotten now, in which they had stood so long unmoved and silent, but they remembered how to laugh, and they saw that the years had given them reason to laugh, as well as to mourn.
Baa-a-a-a-a,
they cried. If the Duke and his hirelings preferred sheep to men, then they must like the foolish noise of sheep. They bleated again.

The flocks on the mountains heard them, and bleated too. Uneasy wethers carried the crying westward. It spread from Golspie to Lairg, and up Loch Shin. It crossed Ben More, and ran along the sides of Loch Assynt. It came to the Atlantic shore, so that over the whole country there was heard the sound of mockery. The south country shepherds in their bothies, nervous and ill at ease, called to their dogs. And in Dunrobin Castle the Duke stopped his ears with trembling hands. But he could not keep out the noise of his defeat.

One

A Room In Kensington Palace on a January morning in 1692. Bright winter-light from a tall window that let in the reflection of sun on snow, and the warmth of a wood fire slowly burning to white ash and rebuilt on piles of ash. The elegance, on plain walls, of a tall portrait by Kneller, and opposite the picture a door hidden by a heavy tapestry from Ghent.

Elegance was reiterated, underlined, in the costume of the two noblemen who sat there: the one in formal pose at a writing-table, the other straddling a tilted chair. They wore periwigs that fell in a foam of curls below their shoulders and gave off a scent of powder; long coats to the knee, with heavy sleeves on which great cuffs reached back to the elbow; cravats of Dutch lace, three or four pairs of silk stockings against the cold, and pretty, silver-hilted swords. Nothing in their costume betrayed their country—unless all did—for they came of a poor land that for fifty years had known scant luxury and little peace.

He at the table was Sir John Dalrymple, called the Master of Stair, and now King William's Secretary for Scotland. A stranger who could recognise intelligence, and be impressed by it, would have admired the manifest intelligence of his face; but might have cared less for its complacency. Those who knew him in his private life found his conversation ripe and abundant, his temper genial; but every Jacobite denounced him as a turncoat, every Presbyterian detested him as a trimmer. His intelligence was too cold, and he hated extremity on either side: perhaps nothing but extremity. He was a Lowlander from the south-western parts of Scotland, and had little knowledge of the Highlands, but a deep, intrinsical dislike of them. He knew some of the chiefs of their clans, and despised them for their arrogance, the barbaric finery they flaunted, and their witless loyalties. They were the extremest dangers to the life of reason, good sense, and constituted order for which he wished, and his temper froze in hatred of the anarchy of their mountains, the treason in their glens. But now, to deal with the barbarians—whose present mockery of King William and his policy aggravated their natural faults—he was entertaining
a Highland chief whom he trusted for one good reason, and only one. He was astute, and his loyalty would lie where advantage lay.