The Goose Girl and Other Stories (3 page)

‘It's what I've been wanting for the last two months and more,' I told her.

‘She couldn't agree, and you wouldn't expect her to, until she'd spoken to her mother about it,' said the old woman grimly. ‘She's a good girl, and it's a treasure that you're getting.'

I told her, humbly, that I was well aware of that.

‘You've been a soldier, she says?'

‘For six years I was.'

‘I'm glad of that,' she cried, nodding her head. ‘It's an ill world we live in, and there's times when the soldiers are all we can depend on, though it's a fool's trade if you look at it squarely.'

I had nothing to say to that, and she went on briskly: ‘Well, if you're going to be married you'll be married in a decent manner, with the neighbours there to see it, and something good enough for them to remember too.'

‘A wedding,' I said, ‘is a woman's affair. I'm willing to be married in any way that suits Lydia. If she wants a big wedding, we'll have it. I've got about a hundred and sixty pounds in the bank—'

‘We're not asking you for money,' said the old woman. ‘It's not a pauper you're marrying, no, faith! nor anything like poverty neither.'

She went to an old black wooden desk that stood in a corner of the kitchen, with a calendar pinned above it, and took a bank pass-book from a pigeon-hole stuffed with papers. ‘Look at that,' she said, and held it open in front of me.

I was flabbergasted. It had never occurred to me that they could have any money at all, but the pass-book showed a credit of £1,207.

‘Eight hundred and fifteen pounds of that is Lydia's own money,' said the old woman. ‘Five hundred pounds came to her when she was born, and the rest is the interest which I've never touched and never shall. Her money will be hers to spend as she wants when she's of age—you've got three years to wait, so you needn't go to market yet—and the wedding I'll pay for out of my own.'

She gave me a dram then, and took one herself. Just the one
each—it was the first time I had tasted whisky since that night at the Norquoys'—and then she put the bottle away in a cupboard with some fancy tumblers and glass dishes. She went out to the byre after that, to milk their two cows, and left Lydia and me together. Lydia had hardly spoken a word since I came in.

The following Sunday the banns were read in the Parish Church, and a few days later the old woman showed me the invitation cards she had had printed for the wedding. She hadn't done it cheaply, that was clear. They were a good thick board with gilt edges, and they read:

Miss Thomasina Manson
requests the pleasure of your company
at the wedding of her daughter
Lydia
to Mr Robert Lacey Tyndall
in the Ladyfirth Parish Hall
at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, September 6th

R.S.V.P.

Dancing

I said they had a very dignified appearance, and so they had if you weren't so hidebound by convention as to be startled by the prefix to the mother's name. The old woman was very proud of them, and propped one up on the chimney-piece. Then Lydia and I sat down at the kitchen table and began to write in names and address envelopes. The old woman had prepared a list, and there were two hundred and eighteen names on it. But by then I was beyond surprise.

I had no difficulty in dissuading my own parents from coming. I had always been the unwanted member of my family, and I had disillusioned them so often that they could guess the disappointment they would find in my wedding. They had grown accustomed to my disappointing them. I had never enjoyed teaching in an elementary school in Falkirk—that was due to my falling in love, at the age of nineteen, with a female Socialist with red hair and the sort of figure that, in a jersey, is like an incitement to riot—but they were shocked by my choice of a profession. They were less perturbed when, later, I went to sea as a deck-hand on a tramp steamer. They didn't like that, but they regarded it as an escapade. In comparison with the rest of the family I was, of course, an utter failure, for both my brothers had gone to Oxford and done well there, and my sister had married the junior partner in a highly regarded firm of stockbrokers. When Archie, my elder brother, was given an O.B.E. my father was much better pleased than when I got my D.C.M. Neither he nor my mother made any serious offer to come to the wedding. I used to get drunk,
when I was younger, and once or twice I had caused them serious embarrassment, so I suppose they thought I should get high, loud, and truculent, and make a spectacle of myself. My father sent Lydia a dressing-case, for which she could discover no purpose at all, and me a cheque for £25. But he missed something by not coming himself.

The old woman wore a black dress that had belonged to her mother, and a man's cap. Not the old ragged tweed one she usually wore, but a new black one such as countrymen sometimes wear at a funeral. She sat in a high-backed chair beside the band, and it was easy enough to guess her thoughts. ‘I bore my child without benefit of clergy or the neighbours' goodwill,' she was thinking, ‘but my child, by God! will have all the favour and fair wishes that money can buy. My child will be wedded as well as bedded, and no one will forget it.'

And no one who saw her will forget Lydia that night. I realised that I still had things to learn, for though I had doted on her beauty, now I was humbled by it. By her beauty and her dignity. I stood beside her, while the Minister was reading the service, and felt like a Crusader keeping his vigil. The schoolmaster was my best man, though his wife hadn't wanted him to be, and I could hear him breathing, hoarsely, as if in perplexity. He ate little more than I did at supper, and I could eat nothing. I danced twice with Lydia, and the rest of the time stood like a moon-calf while people talked to me. But Lydia was never off the floor, and all night her mother, in the high-backed chair beside the band, sat with a look that was simultaneously grim and gloating.

There was a great crowd there, the fiddlers were kept hard at it, and the wedding was well spoken of. Nearly everyone who had been invited had come, and thirty or forty more as well. All the Norquoys were there, but John and his wife left about two o'clock. Before he went he said to me, ‘I'm very glad that you've become one of us, and I hope you'll settle down happily here. You were a good friend to Jim, and if I can help you in any way, be sure and tell me.'

‘There's no one can help me more,' I told him, ‘than by wishing that as I am tonight, so I may continue.'

Lydia came to say good-bye to them while we were speaking, and after they had gone she said, ‘Jim Norquoy was always my mother's favourite among the boys in the parish. She used to tell him that he mustn't be in a hurry to get married, but wait till I grew up and see what he thought of me before going farther afield.'

The schoolmaster came and asked her to dance, and I went outside. The hall was hot and men's faces shone as if they had been oiled, but the night air was cool. There was no wind and the sky was a veiled purple with a little haze round the moon. I could hear the slow boom
and dulled thunder of the Atlantic on the west cliffs, four miles away. West of the cliffs there was no land nearer than Labrador, and for a few minutes I felt dizzy, as if I hung in space over a gulf as great as that. The old woman had meant to marry her to Jim, but Jim had died, and I had fallen heir to his portion. ‘You won't find it easy to go back,' he had said, as if he knew that another fate would claim me. Nor had I gone back to my own country, but come instead to his, to do what I had to.

I remember sailing once, near Oban, in a little yacht I had hired, and getting into a strong tide and being carried swiftly past a rocky shore though the wind had fallen and the sail hung loose. The moon was pulling the tide to sea, and I was going with it. I was helpless in the grip of the moon, and I felt the excitement of its power. The sensation came back to me as I stood outside the hall where the band was playing, and listened to the Atlantic waves, driven by the wind of invisible distant clouds to march against our cliffs. I was moon-drawn again, though I could not see my star. But I knew then that I had come north to the islands, though innocent of any purpose, to take Jim's place, who should have married her but had been killed instead. That was my doom; and I wanted no other. In a little while I went in again and saw the old woman. She was satisfied.

It was nearly seven in the morning when the wedding finished, with the drink done, the band exhausted, and the guests hearing in their imagination the lowing of their cows waiting to be milked. Lydia and her mother and I walked home together, and as soon as we arrived the two of them changed into old clothes and went out to the byre.

Her wedding, however, wasn't the only time when I saw Lydia well-dressed. She had gone to the town day after day, and bought clothes in plenty. Her more ancient garments were thrown away, and her everyday appearance was now smart enough by country standards. She told me one night that it was her mother who had insisted on her dressing like a scarecrow, and often enough wouldn't even let her wash her face for fear of bringing men about the house.

The weeks passed with nothing to spoil our happiness, and I got a job under the County Council, driving a lorry. The mornings and the evenings grew darker, and after a great gale had blown for three days from the north-west the winter came. It was cold and stormy, but after the wildest days the sky might suddenly clear for an evening of enormous calm with a lemon-coloured sky in the west and little tranquil clouds high in the zenith. After the harvest had been gathered and the cattle brought in, the country became strangely empty and its colours were dim. But I liked it. Wherever you stood you had a long
view of land and water, and though the sky might be violent, the lines of the hills were gentle.

When I came home one evening about the middle of November, the old woman told me that Lydia wasn't well. There was nothing seriously wrong, but she would have to stay in bed for a few weeks, and she wanted her—the old woman—to make up a bed for herself in the ben-room. I would have to sleep in the loft.

‘The doctor has seen her?' I asked.

‘No,' said the old woman. ‘I don't believe in doctors.'

I had a general knowledge that accidents might occur in pregnancy, but no precise information, and I couldn't make a physiological picture in my mind. I thought of blood and mortality, and the old woman saw that I was frightened.

‘Don't fret yourself,' she said. ‘She's not going to die yet, nor for many a long year to come. She'll be a brisk, stirring woman long after you're in the kirkyard.'

‘Is it only rest that she needs?' I asked then, thinking vaguely of some anatomical bolt or washer that might have shaken loose, and needed immobility to re-establish itself.

‘Rest,' said the old woman, ‘a long rest and a lot of patience. Now go in and see her, but don't worry her with questions.'

Lydia was pale and she had been crying, but when I knelt beside the bed she put her arms round my neck and told me, as her mother had done, that I mustn't worry. And I didn't worry long. Two or three days, I suppose, and then it began to seem natural that she should have to stay in bed. I took to reading to her when I came home from work. My mother had sent a lot of things that belonged to me, including a box of books. I never had many books, I can't remember having had much time for reading when I was younger, but there were some good stories of adventure that I had enjoyed:
Typhoon
and
The Nigger of the Narcissus, Kim,
and
The White Company,
and Trelawny's
Adventures of a Younger Son, Kidnapped,
and
The Forest Lovers,
and
Revolt in the Desert,
and so on. I've read them all to Lydia at one time or another, and she seemed to enjoy them. I liked reading them again. It was Conrad who was responsible for my going to sea after I had had a year of teaching in Falkirk, and couldn't stand it any longer. I made three or four trips to the Baltic and the Mediterranean in tramp steamers, and a voyage to Australia as a steward in a Blue Funnel boat. But when the war began I had had enough of the sea, so I joined the Army. Lawrence of Arabia may have had something to do with that, or it may have been Kipling.

Only one thing happened to annoy me in the next two or three
months, and that occurred one morning when I was taking a load of road-metal to a secondary road we were patching, and drove past the old woman's cottage, It was a dark day, as dark as gunmetal, and the rain was blowing across country in blustering squalls. As I came near the cottage I saw Lydia crossing the road, leaning against the wind with a half-buttoned waterproof flapping round her, and a zinc pail on her arm. I pulled up hard and jumped out.

‘Are you trying to kill yourself?' I shouted. ‘You're supposed to be in bed, aren't you?'

For the first time since the morning when I'd seen her throwing the gander out of doors, she was angry. Her face seemed to grow narrower than usual, and her lips as hard as marble. She stared straight at me—her eyes are grey, with sometimes a flash of blue in them—and said fiercely, ‘I can look after myself. You go about your business, and I'll take care of mine.'

‘You're supposed to be in bed,' I said again, stupidly and sullenly. There were some eggs in her pail. They had a hen-house across the road, and she had been feeding the hens and gathering what eggs the draggled birds had the strength to lay in that weather. ‘It's madness for you to be stooping and bending and carrying buckets of meal,' I said.

‘I wanted some fresh air,' she said. ‘I can't stay in bed for ever.'

‘Your mother ought to know better, even if you don't. I'm going in to see her,' I said.

‘You'll do no such thing!' she cried. ‘You leave mother and me to manage our own affairs. Don't you interfere, or you'll be sorry for it. And now go! Go, I tell you. You've got work to do, haven't you? Well, go and do it!'