The Goose Girl and Other Stories (27 page)

And then the Sheriff Court, and the silly Sheriff's utter failure to understand a man's emotion. The Sheriff taking sides with property-owners and a bitch of a girl whose finger had been broken because her finger wore a ring whose pledge she had violated. But the Sheriff stood for law and order, though the laws had been made for the protection of weaklings and the concealment of sly maleficence, and order was merely a glozing word to excuse the suppression of a good man's honest indignation. The Sheriff—a weak and disappointed, angry man—was on the nonsensical side of law and order, and moreover owed Lachlan the grocer a bill for £28, so Rory went to a long stretch of prison ....

That was two years ago—nearly three—and vividly he remembered it all in the jolting bus on the road to Beauly, after he had paid his fare with a few of the sixpences that he had found in a whisky-bottle savings-bank in the empty manse. As vividly as the bright-pointed
firth on the one side, the trees and fields on the other, the pictures of misfortune came to mind, and mile after mile his resolution hardened to level the score.

But he watched the road, he re-mapped his memory of the country and a couple of miles short of Beauly he left the bus and following the indication of a broken sign-post took a side-road to a village with the splendid Highland name of Drumnadrochit. This road, as he well remembered, led through fat farm-land, a miniature glen of picture-book appeal, and over a bare hill-side to precipitous descent and Loch Ness. And Loch Ness lay in the Great Glen of Scotland, that led to its western shore and his island goal. But from the broken sign-post Loch Ness was sixteen miles away, and Rory had no wish to walk so far; he kept his eyes wide open, and presently saw a pair of cyclists, dressed for touring, who obligingly left their machines in a ditch and walked through a field to buy milk or eggs at a nearby cottage. He took the nearer bicycle, a racing model with low-slung handle-bars, and went on at fifteen miles an hour. He traversed the little glen, and climbing to the bare hills beyond stopped at the height of a slope to get his breath again; and looking back saw an approaching car that seemed to show official contours, the dark, unfriendly aspect of a police-car.

It was probable that he had been seen, but he could not be sure, and carrying his bicycle he ran for cover to a small copse of birches that grew on broken ground where the heather was long and grey boulders protruded. Fifty yards beyond them was a little tarn, as black as Dublin stout, and into that he threw the bicycle, then turned in the direction from which the police-car was coming, and with all the speed he could muster—but keeping low, keeping under cover—ran a course that would take him, depending always on advantage of the ground, back to the road and observation.

He came to the road round the corner of a tall patch of bracken, and looking up hill saw at the top of it the police-car, stationary. He had been seen: there was no longer any doubt of that. He rose to his knees, and near the copse of birches to which he had run he saw a policeman signalling wildly with both arms. With his right he pointed in such a way, and then with his left to a way that indicated a line of search in a different direction. His purpose was clear enough: he was instructing his fellow-officer to seek the fugitive in one sector, while he sought in another. And as both were searching, the car must be unattended.

Rory ran up hill, praying hard with all the breath he could spare that they, in the excitement of pursuit, had been careless. Whether his
prayer was heard and answered, cannot be ascertained, but careless they had been, and the ignition-key was still in its socket. Rory opened the door, got in, and drove off. Though the police-officers had been neglectful in one respect, they had been punctilious in maintenance of their car, and it was a pleasure to drive it.

What gave Rory less pleasure was the realisation that the police must have picked up his trail in Inverness, and from there followed it closely. The constable, out early in the morning, had reported him, and when the bus arrived in Beauly another constable had met it and questioned the conductor; who had told him that a big man, a passenger from Inverness, had got off at the road to Drumnadrochit.—So much was obvious; but would there be more police waiting for him at Drumnadrochit, or where the minor road he was on met the main highway that ran beside Loch Ness?

Was he important enough to deserve the attention of an elaborate pincer-movement? No, no, thought Rory to himself. The police would believe that one car, close in pursuit of a mere pedestrian, would overtake and capture him without difficulty. And in that estimate of the enemy, which was justified, he drove on; but he drove at great speed, and where the road comes down to Drumnadrochit, in a fearful declivity, he narrowly escaped disaster as, with tyres screaming, he turned sharply to the left. But then he had a smart idea.

The highway, leaving the loch for a few miles, wheels inland in a tight loop, and after his initial left turn Rory should have turned right. But instead he kept straight on, for another mile or two, and left the police-car pointing back to Inverness. He took to the fields, and presently rejoined the highway not far from Castle Urquhart: a noble ruin that stands proudly, in the desolation of its decay, beside the deep waters of Loch Ness, and has in late years found a notoriety to compensate, in a small way, the loss of its ancient grandeur. It is near Castle Urquhart that those who believe in the Monster of Loch Ness have most often seen it swimming.

Now Rory's luck was in, as it had been from the start of his escape, and as he approached the highway he saw, above the Castle, a concourse of motor-cars, and down near the Castle a small horde of people. The weather was fine again, a bright September sun brought out the silver in the loch and the autumn colours in the steep hill-sides, and for tourists there was every temptation to pause and observe the many delights of a great scene of natural grandeur; and what had happened was this.—A tourist from Basingstoke (as was subsequently discovered: for the whole occasion was closely described by the newspapers) who was driving very slowly past the Castle, as
most tourists did, observed in the loch a tree-trunk wrenched from its roots by the recent gale, and cried immediately, ‘It's the Monster!' He stopped his car, he and his wife and his wife's mother and two children got out, and to the drivers of several other cars, coming from either direction, who were loitering in the hope of seeing the famous denizen of those haunted waters, they shouted in chorus, ‘The Monster, the Monster!'

All, without hesitation or delay, ran down to the shore, and in the ecstasy of revelation perceived that their doubtful faith in the Monster was justified by the rolling, ungainly movement in the dazzling, sun-pointed water of an uprooted, seventy-foot Douglas fir. More and more tourists, coming from Inverness or Fort William, saw the deserted cars and the people gathered above the ruins of the proud old Castle, and hastened to join them; guessing immediately what they saw. And when Rory arrived there were between fifty and sixty unattended motor-cars on the road.

He, with no interest in the Monster, cast a quickly observant, analytical eye on the assembled machinery, and chose an Austin-Healey. For a dozen miles or more, on the splendid highway that commanded brightly coloured views at which he never looked, he drove at eighty miles an hour, then turned to a lesser, narrow road that led him through a wilderness of hills and moorland, and presented him with two difficulties that reduced his speed.

Within a few miles of leaving the highway he came to a vast scene of industry: the Hydro-Electric Board, for which he had worked to no good end, was building a new dam, of great majesty and huge extent, and what with the large encampment it had had to erect, and the unruly traffic on which work depended, the road for a mile or more was a broken, bumping channel of abominable discomfort and grave danger to springs. Rory, driving slowly, was exasperated by delay but more deeply perturbed when the driver of a lorry waiting to debouch from a side-road recognised and loudly hailed him. He made no response, but immediately remembered the man. It was Hamilton the Anarchist.

He drove on, and as soon as he could drove fast again. But now he was on one of those West Highland roads that are built for one-way traffic only—narrow roads, with a little swelling of their width, a plump arc, every two hundred yards or so, for a passing place—where drivers must watch closely for oncoming traffic, and nicely judge their speed and distance to avoid collision or, at the least, ugly recrimination; and fast driving on such roads is difficult and dangerous. For twenty miles and more he was lucky, but then,
with a loch below him on the left-hand side and a steep drop to its edge, he tried to bluff and jump a heavy shooting-brake—a converted Rolls-Royce of 1930 vintage—whose driver, an angry, red-faced retired Colonel of Highland infantry, refused to be bluffed, and drove steadily on to meet Rory on the narrowness of the road mid-way between the two passing places; and Rory, in the wrong, had to swerve to the left.

He swerved, and his off wheels slipped from the shoulder of the road and sank in soft earth. His stolen car, before it stopped, tilted dangerously over towards the loch below it; and the intolerant shooting-brake with its arrogant driver went on and never cast a backward, pitying glance at him. Rory climbed out of his seat, and dismally considered his situation. He plucked half a hundredweight of heather and packed it under his back wheels, and got in and tried to reverse. But the tremor of the racing wheels threatened to overturn the car completely, and reluctantly he stopped the engine. He tried, with his great strength, to lift the forward end of the car on to firmer ground; but could not move it. And while he was pondering some new device a lorry drew up beside him, and its driver said, ‘You've done well to get as far as this, Rory More, and if you've left tears in the pigs' eyes of the police, there's no one more pleased than me; for I've never liked them, the blue-arsed bastards.'

Rory stood scowling at the driver, who was Hamilton the Anarchist. ‘You were a bloody fool,' he said, ‘to shout my name as I was passing. Who heard you?'

‘Not a soul,' said the Anarchist. ‘I was just surprised and delighted to see you—for we'd all read about your break—but there wasn't a soul within hearing.'

‘What am I to do now?' asked Rory.

The Anarchist got out, and considered the situation. ‘We can't get that car on the road again,' he said, ‘and in any case the police, God blister them, will probably know by now what you're driving. So it's dangerous evidence, and we'd better get rid of it. If both of us heave and lift it from this side—it's just on the poise—it'll topple over and go into the loch, and the loch is deep here. It'll disappear, and you can come on with me. You'll be making for Kyle, I suppose?'

‘That's where I'm going,' said Rory, and looked regretfully at the Austin-Healey that had carried him so fast from his pursuers. But he realised that the Anarchist was right, and with him he bent and lifted the near side of the car, and turned it over, and saw it tumble into the loch with a great splash and disappear.

‘You'll be a lot safer now,' said the Anarchist, and very civilly opened
the door of his cab and invited Rory to step in. They drove off, and after a decent pause, to show that his curiosity was well controlled, the Anarchist asked Rory why he had broken out of prison when, to complete his sentence, he had only another forty-eight days to serve. ‘It was surely a rash thing to do,' he said.

Rory told him the whole story—of how, to begin with, Katie had betrayed him, and Lachlan the holy grocer had taken advantage of her weakness, and then, in the long weeks of prison, of his recurring desire to humiliate and punish them again—and when he had finished, the Anarchist nodded his approval. He was a smallish man with a hard and solemn face, with steel-rimmed spectacles straddling a hawk's-beak nose, with short black hair and a beard-dark chin and bright red cheek-bones in between. He was an educated man, and it was said of him that he came of a good family, but was either illegitimate or had behaved so badly in his youth that he had been thrown out.

‘You've been well advised,' he said, ‘for violence is a very good thing—I mean purposive, deliberate, and properly directed violence—and there's far too little of it in this country, which, I fear, has become wholly decadent; as all big countries must.' Then he began the speech for which he was well known in every encampment of the Hydro-Electric Board, in which he recommended the destruction by violence of the United States of America, the Soviet Union of Russia, the British Empire (or what was left of it), France and its dependencies, the aggregations-by-force of Communist China and Mr Nehru's India, and the so-called popular democracies of Scandinavia. All of them, he said, had become too big for the humane expression of common contentment, or too bureaucratically efficient for the free development within them of the individual spirit; and therefore all merited destruction.

Rory, who had heard the speech many times before, fell asleep while the Anarchist was describing his method of liquidating the Soviet Union, and did not wake again till the Anarchist, digging him in the ribs, asked, ‘And what are you going to do to that woman and the grocer?'

‘Just knock them about a bit,' said Rory.

‘Why not set the skies of revolution aflame with some conspicuous act of vengeance that would stagger the imagination of the world?' asked the Anarchist.

‘What are you thinking of?' asked Rory.

‘Why not blow them up?'

‘What with?'

‘With gelignite,' said the Anarchist.

‘Where would I get it?' asked Rory.

‘The lorry is full of it! I've two tons in the back, that I'm taking to Kyle to be shipped home to Glasgow, for it's surplus to requirements, as they say. But if you want some, you're more than welcome. Take as much as you like—and I know where to get fuse and detonators. I can fit you out for a fine, high-class explosion that'll attract attention wherever newspapers are read.'