The Goose Girl and Other Stories (45 page)

Then she returned to Glinka and said, ‘Come home with me and we shall drink something better than beer.'

Glinka needed no persuasion. He had heard tales of the fantastic good fortune that sometimes, but all too rarely, befell a fine-looking young man, and he was ready to enjoy it if he could. On the way to Upper Berkeley Street—they caught a passing taxi—he embroidered his patriotic intentions with bright heroical words and convincing detail, and Olenina sat calmly in the expectation of sacrifice.

They entered the flat. Dunyasha, Olenina's maid, regarded the visitor with some surprise, and he, with obvious admiration of the richly furnished rooms, looked about him with unconcealed pleasure. Dunyasha was a sturdily built woman, about forty years old, with a confident manner and a well-marked moustache. Olenina told her to bring champagne. ‘Bring two bottles,' she said. ‘This is a fellow-countryman who is going home next week to join the Army. Very soon he will be fighting for Russia and for us. Bring three bottles of champagne.'

When Dunyasha had brought the wine, and set glasses on a tray, Olenina told her she could go to bed. ‘I will look after the soldier,' she said.

Glinka drank greedily, and as he became a little drunk his manner grew more familiar. But Olenina scarcely saw him, scarcely heard what he said. To her he was Russia-in-arms, and in the calm that exists in the very centre of ecstasy she waited, blissful and impercipient, for the hour of her sacrifice. She saw Glinka's brown eyes, she saw a long grey line of Russian infantry advancing in the face of terrible gun-fire—and she saw herself, in the holy name of Russia, giving to her soldier what joy she might before he died for Russia.

Glinka drank another glass of champagne, and, coming closer to her, put his hand on her leg. ‘Big eyes, fat thighs,' he said happily, and pinched her. Olenina, startled from her dream, moved away from him. ‘You must have some more champagne,' she said, and opened the second bottle. She herself had drunk half a glass only. Glinka drank again, dipping his nose into the bubbles, and belched loudly. ‘Better up than down,' he said.

Encouraged by the second bottle, his conversation became somewhat coarse, and with a leer he asked Olenina why she had invited
him to her flat, and what she was waiting for now, since he himself was ready for anything. His appearance, as well as his language, had been coarsened by drinking. His eyes were a little red, his cheeks flushed, and his lips, half-open, were slack and heavy. Olenina shivered. Suddenly her ecstasy slid from her, like a falling cloak, and left her cold. Glinka bent over her, and, as she turned from him, kissed her hotly on the neck. She thrust him away, roughly, and he returned to his corner with an expression of sulky disappointment.

‘Why did you ask me if it wasn't for that?' he grumbled. ‘Why did you want me to come home with you?'

‘Because,' said Olenina, ‘ . . . because you are going to fight for Russia,'—and because in a few weeks you may be dead, she thought, but did not say so.—'I don't know,' she said.

‘You'd better make up your mind,' said Glinka, and putting his hand inside his shirt scratched his chest very comfortably.

Like a drunk man who, waking sick and sober, shrinks from the very smell of drink, Olenina shrank from the deed her imagination had so joyfully contemplated. I cannot, I cannot, she thought. And yet, she thought, it is still true that he is a soldier, that he is going to fight for Russia, and that, very likely, he will die for Russia. I brought him here for love, and if I do not give him love I shall have betrayed him, and being a traitor to him I shall be a traitor to Russia. Oh, what a coward I am!—But he is dirty, he is brutal, he would not understand. He is not
nice!
—But he is going to war, he is going to die.—Oh, why did I ever talk to him?

‘Give me some champagne,' she said roughly.

Glinka filled her glass. ‘That's better,' he said. ‘We're going to have some fun after all, are we? Drink it up, there's plenty more here.'

Olenina stood up. ‘Wait here,' she said. ‘I shall be back in a minute or two.'

She went to Dunyasha's room, who slept in a closet on the other side of the hall. She left the drawing-room door open, and presently Glinka heard voices in argument. He shrugged his shoulders and filled his glass again. He was enjoying himself. He was not too drunk to realise the charm of his situation, and he felt reasonably sure that the night was going to end satisfactorily for him. Idly he wondered what Olenina and Dunyasha were talking about. Then he saw Olenina's bag, that she had left on a little table. He opened it, and found a purse containing three five-pound notes and half a dozen sovereigns. He hesitated, fingering the notes, and then, tossing one of the sovereigns into the air, caught it and put it into his pocket. He closed the purse, reluctant to lose sight of so
much money but frightened to steal any more, and slid it back into the bag.

Olenina came in with a little frown on her forehead and a purposeful step. She took the purse from her bag and returned to Dunyasha's room. She was there for a few seconds only. Almost immediately she came back, and said to Glinka, ‘You want to make love, don't you?'

Glinka whistled and made an improper gesture.

‘Then come with me,' said Olenina, and led him across the hall to Dunyasha's room. ‘Go in there,' she said, and shut the door behind him.

In the drawing-room again, alone, she drank a little more champagne, and stood frowning at her thoughts. Then she laughed. ‘To live is to love and to love is to live,' she said, ‘and when living is not a pleasant thing, why,
nos valets le feront pour nous—et pour la Russie, en effet!'

One

We Who are the shrivelled little bastard cousins of God—the last thin paring of his finger-nails, with the urge to create still beating against the hard and horny consciousness of separation from Him—we who have power beyond the scope and faculty of our neighbours, may come to know the pain of an impotence that never plagues and bedevils them. We, like God, need belief: the belief of those for whom we create. And without belief, we cannot. God Himself is failing, and if scepticism, neglect, and blank indifference can undo Him, how should I be immune? But that is no lenitive for the pain. He, perhaps, can find some recompense. There's none for me.

It was with a sullen knowledge of defeat waiting for me at the table that I went downstairs to my work-room, with the howl and bellow of the storm in my ears, for the house stood quite exposed to the north-west, and since midnight we had felt the walls shaking under the impact of a gale that drove from Labrador across the wild, white-tipped Atlantic—a graveyard torn up to show dead bones—and menaced with its fury the shelter of our thick-slated roof. Isobel had left me and gone into the children's room, where the younger one—a nervous, dull-witted girl—was crying; and I had slept and wakened, dozed and wakened again, like an angry, sleepy passenger in a railway carriage. My body, as I went downstairs, was as tired and miserable as my mind.

But, as always, I opened the door of my work-room with caution, quietly, with a little surge of expectancy. The big window looked out at a well-grown lawn I had levelled and sown seven years before: a lawn that was guarded on its western side by a thick, untidy hedge of blackthorn and beech, and to the north ran into some forty acres of thin heather grazed by a score of black-faced sheep. Below the lawn was a small meadow, and beyond it the ever-changing, bright-waved loch on which, for the last two or three years, I had taken my chiefest pleasure.

The new-made lawn had attracted an uncommon variety of birds to its bright sward. Snow-buntings came in winter, a chorus of small, clear voices rippling in the white drift of their wings; and
black-headed gulls from the colony that nested by the marshy pool in the moor. Twice I have seen a greenshank parading on long pale legs, and once a dotterel looked at me with infinite surprise—or so it seemed—under his white eyebrow. Last year I was enchanted by a pair of snipe that, every morning for a fortnight, brought their young on to the lawn. They were, to begin with, intensely shy and cautious. One of the old birds, treading high-toed and hesitant, would first make a reconnaissance; and then, as if to signal that all was well, would begin to prod the green turf with its long beak. The two nestlings would follow, and they, unlike their parents, were utterly confident, wholly without fear, and ran about on tottering feet—two tufts of brown feather with bright eyes—while the old birds kept their nervous watch. The second parent (I never knew which was cock and which was hen) stayed always on the border of grass that fringed the moor.

I had, then, fallen into the habit of approaching my window almost as carefully as a scout crawling to a sky-line—but this morning I had no need to go as far. The window was a transparent drum-skin, reverberating the noise of the gale, and on the ledge was a bird like a lapwing in shape and size; one wing, aloft, as if dislocated—its feathers fluttering—was pressed hard against the glass. Its black cap was ruffled, and a round black eye stared into the room, and straight at me, with the intensity (as I first thought) of desperate fear.

I felt an absurd anxiety. I wanted, immediately, to free it from its obvious distress; and that I could not see how to do. Should I open the middle panel of the window, and coax it into the shelter of the room? But there, in a confinement it had never known, it would hurt itself in a frenzy to escape. Or should I go out and chase it from the delusive glass—chase it into the gale that might carry it, helpless, against a fence or wall where it could break a wing? I went nearer the window, now puzzling to identify the bird. I had never seen one of its sort before: of that I was sure. Its colouring was elegant: a pale fawn with a golden throat, black primaries with a black and white tail, a neat black cap with a blue burnish and a white eyebrow, and a curved black line running back from the eye. It was slimmer than a lapwing, perhaps a little larger, and its legs were dark.

I went closer still, and the shining circle of its eye held me in a fixed regard. Its expression had changed; or so I thought. It seemed now to be staring at me with a cold and dark appraisal. But that, I told myself, was ridiculous, and slowly I approached till I was only a foot or so from the window. Then the bird re-settled its fluttered wing, turned inwards—the wind under its tail lifted it like a fan—and looked
straight at me with gleaming, slightly converging eyes. I felt a prickle of cold on my forehead, a little draught of cold under the arms, and foolishly—I heard the folly of it—I laughed. A nervous laugh that, by making me aware of myself, brought me to my senses.

From a shelf I took down a volume of Witherby's
Handbook of British Birds,
and soon found what I wanted. I wasn't to be blamed for not recognising my visitor, which was described as a ‘very rare vagrant'. Only once before had it been seen, or recognised, in Scotland, and then as far from here as Orkney. I returned to the window, to compare it with the picture in Witherby, and now, with no apparent difficulty, the bird took off against the gale and flew to the far end of the lawn. It flew like a lapwing, and in the partial shelter of the hedge it settled, ran a yard or two, paused, and ran on: just like a lapwing. It seemed now a very normal sort of bird, and I went out to look at it again.

The wind met me with a buffet, and I leaned against it. The sky was a tumbled mass of fast-moving cloud, with here and there a pale blue gulf of vacancy, and the loch was a white-haired fury of grey water. A pillow of clotted foam had been blown against the boat-house door, and the jetty below it was smothered in white. I said to the bird, ‘You've chosen a poor sort of day to come visiting,' and as if unaware that I was a only a few yards away, it poked suddenly at the grass—tilting its body on stiff legs, like a lapwing—to pull out a grub. I watched it for a few minutes, and went in again.

On Plate 122 in Witherby there was a very pretty picture of it: a Sociable Plover, beyond question, though according to the book it was smaller than a lapwing, and my visitor was certainly a little bigger. I felt extremely pleased to have so notable an addition to the guests of my lawn, and I thought of writing a short letter—to
The Times
or the
Glasgow Herald?
—to boast a little of my Plover . . . . But that might bring a dozen fervid ornithologists to the island, to pester me with their enthusiasm; which I did not want. So I put off letter-writing, as, for the last six or seven months, I have again and again put off writing of any sort; often with less excuse, or no excuse at all. No excuse but an overpowering sense of loss and hopelessness, of the unbearable tedium of writing when I know that none will read. Or only a beggarly few hundred now.

It was different when I wrote
John Gaffikin,
and sold 50,000 in Britain, almost as many in America. The second one did nearly as well, and the third was better than the first. Much better. And I deserved success, for I had found, with brilliant discovery, an idea of durable value and I knew how to realise it. None of your foot-slogging patient historical novels, covering ten years of narrative as slowly
as the years and groaning under their load of costume, ornament, and quaint device, but a quick and sudden tale, lasting in time no more than a day or two, and embodying in action the temper and quiddity of its age. Each one, moreover, the tale of someone in the family I imagined, and have half-created, that holds (or should hold) like a knotted cord the growth and decline of England from the Great Armada to the partial dissolution of our power. There was an Elizabethan Gaffikin, a Gaffikin who made his fortune as a Puritan, and a Gaffikin who spent it under Charles II. Of them I wrote—that was before the war—and each time packed what I had to say into an acting-time of two or three days—no more—and got into three hundred pages the spirit, sentiment, and bowels of energy, falsehood or waste, that informed the age. I wrote well—they all admitted that—and I sold well.