The Goose Girl and Other Stories (22 page)

It was on the twelfth day of February that the weather changed. The wind came from the north-east, and the sky filled with the grey-blue menace of heavy snow. Two horsemen—an officer and a trooper—had come down from the ferry-landing, and for an hour the officer had walked with Glenlyon, apart and remote from others. When he had gone again, Glenlyon called his subalterns and Sergeant Barber, and gave them their instructions. Presently they went with their orders, and summoned the men to hear them. The snow was falling as they went, in a slanting, impenetrable drift of soft, wet, bog-cotton flowers. To begin with, it melted as it fell; but the air grew colder, and in a little while the floor of the glen was carpeted in white, and the still falling snow thickened on the ground. Before dark the valley and the invisible hills were all one colour, blanched beneath the dusk and gathering from the sky a weight that was scarcely palpable, and yet, by accumulation, deadening: a weight, as it curiously seemed, of silence.

In that silence, imposed by the sky, men whispered to each other and sought by murmured questions an explanation of orders they could not understand and as yet did not wholly believe. ‘No quarter,' they muttered. ‘Is that right? Is that what he said?' And again: ‘No prisoners. It is an order from the Government, they want no prisoners.' ‘They are all to be killed, and the clachan must be burnt.'

‘You heard the same?'

‘The very same.'

‘But why—why now, after all these days?' ‘In God's name, why?'

Sergeant Barber felt neither fear nor compunction. He was inured to discipline, and nothing demanded by discipline could surprise or dismay him. He knew that Maclan and his clan, regarded by authority as a tribe of robbers, had been condemned to punishment; and he was an instrument of authority, trained and dedicated. He took his pay, and was content in his service. He would, if need be, die for his meagre
wage, because it was obscurely related to a loyalty which had grown from a long habit of discipline, and now enclosed his whole mind. As he set no great store on his own life—apart from the gratification of drink, and his strange pleasure, when drunk, of singing bawdy songs—he felt small respect for the lives of others. Never before had he been ordered to kill women and children, and he had no intention of doing so now; but, by his command, the private soldiers would butcher the cows and calves of the herd. He had no compunction about giving such orders, but his dignity would restrict his own activity.

The two Lindsays shared a flask of brandy, and exercising their meagre equipment of imagination, pretended to each other with beggarly excuse and threadbare equivocation that what they were commanded to do was no more than an ordinary fragment of a soldier's duty. They enjoyed the authority that went with being officers in the King's army, and darkly they suspected how insignificant they would be without their commissions. They wore a uniform that defied criticism, buttressed their importance, and commanded obedience; and by obedience they could save their title to respect.—But still they felt queasy, and wished they had more brandy to sustain their logic and fortify them in obedience. They thought of going to drink at the table of one or other of their friends in the glen; but some vague, uncertain apprehension of impropriety prevented them from that.

Like deer in a high corrie, scenting on a light, uncertain wind the pungent, but far-off odour of men, the people of the glen had caught from the red-coats the smell of their unhappiness, and moved uneasily about their houses. When Alastair, Maclan's younger son, went home before dusk, his wife told him that a child had seen one of the red-coats clapping a grey boulder on the moor—a boulder that looked like a dead and frozen stag on the dead, grey heather—and heard him say to it, ‘Grey stag of the glen, get up on your feet and go. Go, go from the glen before you see what the night will bring.'

‘A daft-like saying,' said Alastair. ‘These men of Argyll's are as daft as children, and with a dram in them as daft as old women. There's no meaning in their words, and nothing to fear.'

A little while later he was bidden to play cards with Glenlyon and the two Lindsays and his brother John; but the party fell into dispute and broke up early, though Glenlyon was rarely ill-humoured and notoriously a late sitter. Alastair had seen the mounted officer who came to talk with Glenlyon, and with that memory in his mind, and Glenlyon's nervous loss of temper over a bad hand, he went home with troubled thoughts and lay sleepless by his wife. At midnight he
rose and looked out; and from his doorway, through the falling snow, he saw a light in the cabin where the quarter-guard was housed. He put on his shoes and wrapped his plaid about him, and went to the house of his brother John. But John thought there was no cause for alarm, and Alastair went home again.

Some of the lesser folk in the glen were not so complacent, and lay all night, as if listening to the wind, but listening rather for the ill tidings that would substantiate their fear: the instinctive fear of a wild herd, lulled into security, but now scenting on a draught of intuition the familiar smell of danger.

At five o'clock in the morning the elder Lindsay, with half a dozen soldiers, demanded entry to Maclan's house. The door was opened, and the old man, warm in bed, sat up and put a leg to the ground. ‘Let us have more light,' he said, with hospitality dominant in his Highland mind. ‘I cannot see who my guests are, but the morning's cold, and whoever you are you will be the better of a dram.'

His wife was in her clothes. She, oppressed by the whispering and the smell of fear, had not undressed but sat all night by the fire. She went, uncertainly, to the cupboard where Maclan kept his wine, and as she fumbled in the shadows a pistol-shot, and then another, banged and bellowed under the rafters; and the great body of Maclan—shot in the head, shot in the chest—fell down upon the blankets and tumbled to the floor. Then, in a frenzy of murderous excitement, the soldiers assaulted his old, stubborn, thick-set wife, beating her with the muzzles and butts of their muskets, tearing her clothes, and ripping the rings from her fingers with wolfish teeth.

They went out to a growing clamour of flame and confusion, and the still continuing wild fall of the snow. There was a new force in the glen, for some of the forward troops from Fort William—the four hundred soldiers that Major Duncanson commanded—had found their way down the Devil's Staircase, the dangerous pass over the northern wall above Loch Triachtan; but most of them were lost and benighted, and their purpose of closing escape to the east had been defeated. Those who had crossed the mountain—their leading files had marched in a lull of the storm—looked about them, and saw strangers. But that was common to all the soldiers. The red-coats who had lived together in the glen for nearly a fortnight were now all strangers to each other.

When they were told that their duty was to destroy, utterly and without mercy, Maclan and all his people—to kill the men, women, and children with whom they had lived in kindliness—their humanity revolted against the monstrous order, but their discipline compelled
mute acquiescence. Day after day they had drilled on the frozen fields, and drill had so sternly taught them the habit of obedience that now it was hardly within the compass of their thought to question an order, or doubt the inescapable necessity of obedience. But in spite of drill, and the lessons of discipline, they heard the command to murder with bewilderment and consternation; for it mocked and derided an older habit than obedience, and the kindly laws of hospitality. They had been the guests of Maclan and his clan, they had eaten their bread and drunk with them—and now to turn against their hosts was black, unmitigated treachery. In the simplicity of their hearts they had thought—they had always been told—that the bonds of hospitality were unbreakable. A host and his guest were safer company than a father and his son; or so they had believed.

But now they were commanded to break the ancient law and defile the sanctuary of old custom; and in their simplicity they saw no escape from the obedience that the voice of Sergeant Barber, day after day, had hammered into their anxious, listening ears. Obedience to that voice had been driven home like a nail, impaling thought on the blank habit of conformity. There was no way of escape but one: they must escape themselves.

In the hours of waiting, every man had gone apart, communing with himself, and striven to lose himself in the impersonation of sheer discipline that Sergeant Barber presented to them. They had pressed their hands hard against closed eyes, rubbed and fretted their cheeks to drive feeling from their flesh, and then re-moulded their features, as well as might be, to the cold, inhuman calm of discipline. They had driven sensibility out of sight, and put on, against a climate harsher than winter, thick masks of discipline. When they met again, they hardly recognised each other; but some were like grotesque and ill-drawn caricatures of Sergeant Barber.

The Sergeant himself felt no need for a mask; and Glenlyon's cracked and varnished skin was enough for him.

At Achnacon Sergeant Barber had found some eight or ten men sitting by the fire, and a volley through the door killed half of them, and wounded others. But one escaped, who asked, with a condemned man's whimsy, if he might be killed out of doors. It was the sort of jocularity that appealed to Barber, who granted him his wish. But the man who should have died threw his plaid over the heads of the soldiers about him, and took to the hill. In the nearby houses Barber and his troop found others, less alert and agile, and the bodies of those they killed, dragging them bloodily through the
snow, they threw upon the cottage middens. There was a small child among them.

At Inverrigan, Glenlyon surprised nine men, and took the precaution, not trusting his marksmen, of binding them hand and foot before they were shot. But Glenlyon, whose drink-sodden mind was incapable of apprehension or remorse, was equally incapable of perseverance and application: now he grew listless, and looked about him at the flames of burning thatches that here and there strangely lighted the falling snow—that exposed, in a red and smoky glare, the drifting descent of the snow against scarlet flames and the shadow of the smoke—and turned to a rusty black the splash and smear of blood on the white carpet of the glen.

He listened with indifference—with the detachment of a man who had drunk himself into detachment—to musket-shots in the darkness, to an occasional rattle of musketry, and said to an officer who came striding towards him with purpose in his step, with intention in his carriage, ‘I'll wager six to one, in groats or guineas—whichever suits your pocket—that both my doltish subalterns have made a horse's mash of their orders, and the musketry we can hear is probably the Lindsays shooting at each other.'

The officer to whom he spoke was a Captain Drummond, who, commanding the advance-guard of Duncanson's detachment from the Fort William garrison, had crossed the mountain and found the Devil's Staircase before the storm thickened. He was a man who, ruthless by nature, was susceptible, within smell of blood, to the mania of homicide; and Glenlyon's drunken indifference inflamed his temper. There was a young man nearby, in the grip of two soldiers, who stammered a plea for mercy. Drummond, with a pistol, shot him dead. A boy threw himself at Glenlyon's feet; Drummond, with his other pistol, shot him too. Glenlyon, with a sudden fit of hiccups, walked into the darkness, and Drummond, accompanied by a few soldiers whom he ordered to attend him, found a child, a woman, and an old man; and killed them.

Both Alastair and John, Maclan's sons, had escaped the slaughter; and, as Glenlyon had guessed, their escape was due, in part, to the dullard incompetence of the two young Lindsays, who had each gone to the other's objective—realised their mistake—and returning, met and wasted ten minutes in furious abuse and argument. Alastair and John, and some of their two households, had escaped the murderers, but now lay hiding under the pitiless onslaught of the sky. Nearly all the houses in the glen were aflame, and each, in the falling snow, made a core of heat in which the snow dissolved, but round which the drifting
flakes were illumined in a bright and heartless prettiness. In byres and stables a few animals, caught by the fire, screamed and bellowed their pain and fear; and others, let loose, were lowing hungrily for their morning feed. Slowly the sky lightened to grey, and the burning houses were rooted to the ground in the red embers of their fallen posts and rafters.

John's daughter, Shiona, had escaped with her father, but she was late in leaving the house, having gone back to look for some trinket that her young husband had given her before he died. Her child was heavy in her arms, and she could not walk as quickly as the others. She fell farther behind, and though she knew the corrie for which they were making, she mistook her way, and presently, in a wild squall that blinded and confused her, she sank down for shelter under a stark rock that stood on the hillside like the prow of a wrecked ship. Her baby, a lusty child, began to cry with the impassioned resolution of its age, and nothing she could do or say would quieten it.

The light was coming through the winter sky, and Captain Drummond had mustered some stragglers of Argyll's Regiment—men who stood about in the warmth of burning houses with no apparent purpose or intention—to hunt fugitives and follow trails of blood. One of his little troop was Ian Og of the Bield, who, alone in Glenlyon's company, had determined to disobey his orders. He had looked for Shiona, to warn her of what was impending, and failed to find her because Shiona, a lively, gossiping girl, had been going from house to house, not so much afraid of what whispering threatened, as greedy to hear all the whispers.

Then, when Ian Og had to follow the elder Lindsay—for he dared not openly disobey—he had been led astray, and in desperation had deserted his troop; but still could not find Shiona. He had taken off his red coat and thrown it away, for a sign of rebellion, and wrapped himself in a great plaid. But now, when Drummond called to him, the dismay and wretchedness of his mind were so heavy that he followed like a bullock in a drover's herd.