The Goose Girl and Other Stories (48 page)

‘Don't tell me I'm to blame. I've heard that too often.'

‘I'm in no state of mind to blame anyone. I haven't the force of will to discriminate, or the energy to decide. But you can't disclaim all responsibility.'

I could, of course—but not without a very embarrassing argument. The simple, unappetising fact of the matter was that I had once spent a couple of nights with Torquil in a Glasgow hotel, and then refused to have anything more to do with him. After my first year or two in Morissey, when he had ignored me, he began to show signs of interest, which presently became a specific interest. I was, I admit, attracted to him—as many women, in my circumstances, would have been—but also I knew how vulnerable I was. In my position I couldn't afford a scandal—that was obvious—and after one or two unpleasant scenes I thought I had convinced him of it, and found relief from a very pressing danger. But then I went to Glasgow, for a few days' shopping, and Torquil was there to meet me. We dined together, and in the remoteness, the anonymity, the irresponsibility of that vast hive of people, I gave in.

But two nights were enough. Oh, more than enough. I wasn't inexperienced, and I'm not unduly sensitive—but I'm not a troop of girls in a brothel, and that's what he needed. How Isobel has put up with him I don't understand; unless her stupidity is so dense, unfeeling, and imperceptive that it gives her a sort of invincible
innocence. But Torquil and I quarrelled bitterly—noisily, vulgarly—and his vanity was wounded to the core. I left him in Glasgow, and went back to Morissey in profound relief; for the temptation he had offered was now gone for ever. But that he would not accept, or could not understand, and when, a week or so later, he came home, it was to parade in romantic despair and beg me to have pity on him. He made a great fool of himself, and hugged his disappointment as if he loved it. Perhaps he did. Perhaps it was a new experience, the first time a woman had disappointed him. He told me, in solemn anger, that I was ruining his life, and implied that no mere woman's whimsy should ever obstruct or exasperate a life that was held in trust for English literature. But he got no sympathy.

Then Isobel told me he was drinking heavily—more heavily than before—and I wondered, for a moment, if she was going to accuse me of hard-heartedness. She was so besotted with him, so convinced of his genius, that she might well have told me it was my duty to give him whatever small pleasure I could offer. But for once she was sensible, and said, ‘It's my opinion that he's bored with this new book he's writing. He feels he ought to do it, and doesn't want to, so he drinks instead.'—And that, I've little doubt, was the truth of it.

But now, with him in my small and shabby room—on the verge of departure and still sorry for himself—I could say nothing of all this; and quickly turning myself into a whole-time medical practitioner—a calm and sagacious country doctor—I gave him good advice instead. I told him not to drink too much on the voyage, and wrote a prescription for sleeping-pills.

My professional manner soon bored him, and after another small brandy-and-water he got up and said goodnight. I wished him luck and a happy return; and closed the door behind him.

Three

I could find no ship to take me to South America, and instead of the Amazon went to Kenya and South Africa. By sea—a dull voyage—to Mombasa, six weeks with a dim cousin in Nyeri, a trip to Uganda, a month with an old friend in Buluwayo, then a couple of weeks in Cape Town, and the voyage home; which was duller than the outward journey. All this was wasted time, except for a few hours. I got small enjoyment, and nothing else from it: no fertile thought, no propulsive or breeding view of humanity and its purpose. I dislike black men, and I found the African landscape either boring or repugnant, except for the luminous skies of Kenya, on which clouds lie like swansdown
pillows, puffed-up and plumply patted on translucent satin that shows behind it coverlets of ever deeper blue. The skies of Kenya reveal a beauty that is quite incredible.

But the few hours of real value were spent at the Victoria Falls, where I discovered that I had no wish or will to commit suicide. I had been worried by the apparent ease with which that abominable bird had tempted me to look down, from my boat, into the cool, green, enticing depths of the loch; and, sorely perplexed, I had wondered if I harboured in my mind a secret thought of self-destruction. To test myself, I went deliberately to the Falls, and on either side of them stood, with intention, beside their superb and natural solicitation to death.

Nowhere on earth have I seen a more majestic spectacle than that vast descent of water turning with a roar to flocculence—the hypnotic, downward curve of solid water into a descent of floating whiteness that compels from the abyss a continuous, resounding bellow; and above the tumult of the enormous, broken stream a constant cloud, a vapour of air and water—and nowhere, in knowledge or imagination, can there be a stronger temptation to join the elements and enjoy the total dissolve, which they promise, of the wretched load of individual consciousness. But I stood, first on one side, then on the other, of that stupendous gorge—that break in the earth's crust, that breach of time and solid nature—and let the chorussed invitation of the waters to join them in dissolution fill my ears—let the sight of the burden of water transmuted by a great height into the weightless beauty of immaculate whiteness fill my eyes—and in the sober consciousness of my mind I felt no impulse to throw myself down. There was, within my deepest self, no thought, impulse, or hidden desire of suicide. That I knew, having faced the temptation of height and beauty and dissolving waters.

Of the rest of my voyage I shall say little. I behaved, on the whole, with a bourgeois common sense. I rarely drank too much, and only twice retreated from the common form of good behaviour: once in the darkest African parts of Kampala, once in Johannesburg, where I found opportunity for that sort of orgiastic pleasure which, I confess, has been a recurrent temptation throughout my life. But my average of behaviour was good, and though I got little enjoyment and less instruction from my journey, I came back to Morissey in a better state of health, both of mind and body, than when I left it. And Isobel I met with a new hunger of love: a love compact of gratitude as much as of desire—and every morning she was born anew.

But now I must speak in practical fashion, in a matter-of-fact,
down-to-earth style of words, and admit that I was still a little frightened. For a few days I watched, nervously, for the return of the Plover. But he did not come again. The lapwings, the ordinary green plover, had by then diminished in numbers: there is a local migration that increases their number in the spring, reduces it in autumn. The migrants had gone, and by a rationalisation of my fear I concluded that my Sociable Plover, the fetch or sending, had gone with them. My nervous fear—the tension of fear—relaxed.

Superficially I was irritated by the presence of Isobel's sister Beatrice. She has two sisters, and I like neither of them. The eldest of the three is a lecturer in Economics at a red-brick university in the middle of England: a handsome woman of stiff and splendid presence who belies her appearance by the damp fervour of her belief in every dislocated idea that was thought ‘progressive' twenty years ago. The middle sister, Beatrice, is an artist, a painter in the abstract style, and a Lesbian. She has, in that condition of life, the unfortunate advantages of a face and figure like Goya's—what's her name? The luscious aristocrat he painted nude, but when he painted her with a rag of clothing was denounced for his indecency—and when I first discovered the prohibitive temper of her mind I was savagely disillusioned. I was still, in a subdued and fretful way, resentful of her presence: that appeared to promise so much, and could give nothing. But Isobel was fond of her—fond also of Leonora, the stiff-seeming, soggy-minded lecturer in Economics—and twice a year we had each of them to stay with us for several weeks.

Beatrice was there when I returned to Morissey, and stayed three weeks. A few days after she left I had a dream that was more like visible and palpable experience than any other dream I have ever had: more real, in dreaming and in memory, than many days of open-eyed experience.—I was on the shore below the strip of meadow that fringes the loch, fishing thigh-deep in wading-boots, and Beatrice, watching, was sitting on a tumbled dyke behind me. Fish were rising, but not, as I thought, in a normal way. It looked as if they were being hunted by some larger fish. I was casting with a long line, to try and reach them, when Beatrice cried, ‘There's something under the water!'

Then the surface was broken by a white and noble head, and with a ponderous assurance, with an ideal and perfect dignity—scattering the wetness of his fur with a shake and a shiver that surrounded him with a cloud of diamond drops—a great white hound came ashore. I retreated as he advanced, and our movement was slow, hieratic, as if in solemn procession.

Beatrice, in a foolish voice, cried, ‘Oh, its a seal!'

But I, quite calmly, said, ‘No, it's the Great White Hound of Cuchullin.'

It had a smallish head, shaped like a polar bear's, straight and heavy forelegs, a hound's body, and enormous, loping thighs. Its wet fur, round its neck and shoulders, was tightly curled as a Bedlington terrier's; but when I stroked it, it became smooth and wavy. I put my right arm round the hound's neck, and gave it my other hand to nuzzle. It was very gentle, but its teeth were as sharp as a puppy's.

Then I looked round, and saw the two children running down from the house. The elder was wearing fancy-dress that imitated the mask and skin of a panda—a dress she had been given for a children's party—and covering the hound's eyes I shouted to them, ‘Go away, you mustn't make fun of him! You mustn't hurt his feelings!'

They went back to the house, and I clapped the hound on his shoulder. He was very friendly, and laid his nose in the crook of my arm. His eyes looked into mine with gentle confidence. There was no arrogance in his demand, but only trust, and I was conscious that I had become his servant. This knowledge gave me pleasure, and made me feel important.

Then the hound turned, and shook himself again, and slowly waded into the loch. He looked back at me, with the same confiding glance, and I began to follow him. But Beatrice, with a loud cry, seized me with angry hands, and pulled me to the meadow-grass. I struggled with her, and we fell. When I woke up, Isobel was in my arms and I pushed her from me, exclaiming ‘Where's Beatrice gone? And where is the Hound?'

I got up and went to the window. The loch lay calm and empty, a silky, rippled grey, and I felt desolate, as though cheated of some great prize. As though a door to bliss had been closed in my face.

I could hardly believe the slow admission of my mind that I had been dreaming. Night after night I dreamt of my dream—by some deep division of my half-unconscious mind seeing it as a dream, seeing it in perspective—and this re-iteration made it, after every recollection, more oddly real. By dreaming of my dream, I turned it into something like actual experience; and this made me frightened to go near the loch-shore.

What emerged most strongly from an ever-thickening, impacted fantasy was the confiding look in the White Hound's returning eye—the look that bade me follow, and knew I would—and my consciousness that I had been willing to go with him and be drowned.

I felt, too, a mounting, quite irrational hatred of Beatrice for the part
she had played in my dream. I could not endure to hear Isobel speak of her, and one day when Isobel was out and I found, among a little pile of letters that the postman had brought, a letter from Beatrice, I tore it across, unopened in its envelope, and threw the pieces on the fire. Then I began to wonder if I was going mad—and for the first time felt surprised to remember how immediately, in my dream, I had recognised the great water-beast as the Hound of Cuchullin.

Not for many years, not since I was very young, had I read anything of Irish mythology, and with something like consternation I realised that I didn't know if Cuchullin had in fact been attended by a hound.

I had on my shelves the old, massive volumes of the Eleventh Edition of the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
and when I looked him up I discovered that he himself, Cuchullin, was the hound. He, the young hero, had killed the hound of Culann the Smith, and then served as watch-dog to the Smith till a whelp of the dead dog could grow to strength and maturity.—But why had I fetched him from the depths of my mind, and changed him, in the abyss of consciousness, to a water-beast? Had I been looking for a hero to redeem myself? It would, indeed, be a task for a hero.

I felt, increasingly, a disablement of mind or will that invaded and infected my physical parts. As I grew more frightened of going out and approaching the temptation of the loch—the temptation of waters that now were dark and seemed the deeper for their darkness—my arms and legs grew torpid and heavy, disinclined for exertion, and I spent most of the day, and every day, in bed . . . .

Four

There are some women who make such a fuss about having a baby that I could cheerfully knock them on the head, and shake it out. Mary Mclnnes is one of them. She has lain-in once a year since I came to Morrisey, and every time you would think she was the first woman who had ever submitted to the experiment, or else was about to be delivered of a Messiah.

I had spent all night with her, and was still in my dressing-gown, after soaking for an hour in a hot bath, when Isobel rang me up and asked me to come and see Torquil again. I was looking forward to a good breakfast, with a book propped on the tea-pot, and a day which, by tidy management, could be almost idle till my evening surgery. But Isobel was insistent, my breakfast was spoiled by irritation, and I was in a bad temper when I went to see him.

Isobel, to begin with, took me into her own small sitting-room, and closed the door with the portentous care of someone about to reveal a state secret. ‘Torquil,' she said, ‘has been drinking too much.'