The Goose Girl and Other Stories (9 page)

With a splinter of stone he drew a diagram on the rock.

‘Do you know what it is?' he asked. ‘It's the figure the Chinese call the T'ai Chi. They say it represents the origin of all created things. And it's the sign manual of the sea.'

‘But those lines of foam must run into every conceivable shape,' she protested.

‘Oh, they do. They do indeed. But it isn't often you can read them.—There he is!' he exclaimed, leaning forward and staring into the water sixty feet below. ‘That's him, the old villain!'

From his sitting position, pressing hard down with his hands and thrusting against the face of the rock with his heels, he hurled himself into space, and straightening in mid-air broke the smooth green surface of the water with no more splash than a harpoon would have made. A solitary razorbill, sunning himself on a shelf below, fled hurriedly out to sea, and half a dozen white birds, startled by the sudden movement, rose in the air crying ‘Kittiwake! Kittiwake!'

Elizabeth screamed loudly, scrambled to her feet with clumsy speed, then knelt again on the edge of the rock and peered down. In the slowly heaving clear water she could see a pale shape moving, now striped by the dark weed that grew in tangles under the flat foot of the rock, now lost in the shadowy deepness where the tangles were rooted. In a minute or two his head rose from the sea, he shook bright drops from his hair, and looked up at her, laughing. Firmly grasped in his right hand, while he trod water, he held up an enormous blue-black lobster for her admiration. Then he threw it on to the flat rock beside him, and swiftly climbing out of the sea, caught it again and held it, cautious of its bite, till he found a piece of string in his trouser-pocket. He shouted to her, ‘I'll tie its claws, and you can take it home for your supper!'

She had not thought it possible to climb the sheer face of the cliff, but from its forefoot he mounted by steps and handholds invisible from above, and pitching the tied lobster on to the floor of the gazebo, came nimbly over the edge.

‘That's a bigger one than you've ever seen in your life before,' he boasted. ‘He weighs fourteen pounds, I'm certain of it. Fourteen pounds at least. Look at the size of his right claw! He could crack a coconut with that. He tried to crack my ankle when I was swimming an hour ago, and got into his hole before I could catch him. But I've caught him now, the brute. He's had more than twenty years of crime, that black boy. He's twenty-four or twenty-five by the look of him. He's older than you, do you realise that? Unless you're a lot older than you look. How old are you?'

But Elizabeth took no interest in the lobster. She had retreated until she stood with her back to the rock, pressed hard against it, the palms of her hands fumbling on the stone as if feeling for a secret lock or bolt that might give her entrance into it. Her face was white, her lips pale and tremulous.

He looked round at her, when she made no answer, and asked what the matter was.

Her voice was faint and frightened. ‘Who are you?' she whispered, and the whisper broke into a stammer. ‘What are you?'

His expression changed and his face, with the water-drops on it,
grew hard as a rock shining undersea. ‘It's only a few minutes,' he said, ‘since you appeared to know me quite well. You addressed me as Roger Fairfield, didn't you?'

‘But a name's not everything. It doesn't tell you enough.'

‘What more do you want to know?'

Her voice was so strained and thin that her words were like the shadow of words, or words shivering in the cold: ‘To jump like that, into the sea—it wasn't human!'

The coldness of his face wrinkled to a frown. ‘That's a curious remark to make.'

‘You would have killed yourself if—if—'

He took a seaward step again, looked down at the calm green depths below, and said, ‘You're exaggerating, aren't you? It's not much more than fifty feet, sixty perhaps, and the water's deep.—Here, come back! Why are you running away?'

‘Let me go!' she cried. ‘I don't want to stay here. I—I'm frightened.'

‘That's unfortunate. I hadn't expected this to happen.' ‘Please let me go!'

‘I don't think I shall. Not until you've told me what you're frightened of.'

‘Why,' she stammered, ‘why do you wear fur trousers?'

He laughed, and still laughing caught her round the waist and pulled her towards the edge of the rock. ‘Don't be alarmed,' he said. ‘I'm not going to throw you over. But if you insist on a conversation about trousers, I think we should sit down again. Look at the smoothness of the water, and its colour, and the light in the depths of it: have you ever seen anything lovelier? Look at the sky: that's calm enough, isn't it? Look at that fulmar sailing past: he's not worrying, so why should you?'

She leaned away from him, all her weight against the hand that held her waist, but his arm was strong and he seemed unaware of any strain on it. Nor did he pay attention to the distress she was in—she was sobbing dryly, like a child who has cried too long—but continued talking in a light and pleasant conversational tone until the muscles of her body tired and relaxed, and she sat within his enclosing arm, making no more effort to escape, but timorously conscious of his hand upon her side so close beneath her breast.

‘I needn't tell you,' he said, ‘the conventional reasons for wearing trousers. There are people, I know, who sneer at all conventions, and some conventions deserve their sneering. But not the trouser-convention. No, indeed! So we can admit the necessity of the garment,
and pass to consideration of the material. Well, I like sitting on rocks, for one thing, and for such a hobby this is the best stuff in the world. It's very durable, yet soft and comfortable. I can slip into the sea for half an hour without doing it any harm, and when I come out to sun myself on the rock again, it doesn't feel cold and clammy. Nor does it fade in the sun or shrink with the wet. Oh, there are plenty of reasons for having one's trousers made of stuff like this.'

‘And there's a reason,' she said, ‘that you haven't told me.'

‘Are you quite sure of that?'

She was calmer now, and her breathing was controlled. But her face was still white, and her lips were softly nervous when she asked him, ‘Are you going to kill me?'

‘Kill you? Good heavens, no! Why should I do that?'

‘For fear of my telling other people.'

‘And what precisely would you tell them?'

‘You know.'

‘You jump to conclusions far too quickly: that's your trouble. Well, it's a pity for your sake, and a nuisance for me. I don't think I can let you take that lobster home for your supper after all. I don't, in fact, think you will go home for your supper.'

Her eyes grew dark again with fear, her mouth opened, but before she could speak he pulled her to him and closed it, not asking leave, with a roughly occludent kiss.

‘That was to prevent you from screaming. I hate to hear people scream,' he told her, smiling as he spoke. ‘But this'—he kissed her again, now gently and in a more protracted embrace—'that was because I wanted to.'

‘You mustn't!' she cried.

‘But I have,' he said.

‘I don't understand myself! I can't understand what has happened—'

‘Very little yet,' he murmured.

‘Something terrible has happened!'

‘A kiss? Am I so repulsive?'

‘I don't mean that. I mean something inside me. I'm not—at least I think I'm not—I'm not frightened now!'

‘You have no reason to be.'

‘I have every reason in the world. But I'm not! I'm not frightened—but I want to cry.'

‘Then cry,' he said soothingly, and made her pillow her cheek against his breast. ‘But you can't cry comfortably with that ridiculous contraption on your nose.'

He took from her the horn-rimmed spectacles she wore, and threw them into the sea.

‘Oh!' she exclaimed. ‘My glasses!—Oh, why did you do that? Now I can't see. I can't see at all without my glasses!'

‘It's all right,' he assured her. ‘You really won't need them. The refraction,' he added vaguely, ‘will be quite different.'

As if this small but unexpected act of violence had brought to the boiling-point her desire for tears, they bubbled over, and because she threw her arms about him in a sort of fond despair, and snuggled close, sobbing vigorously still, he felt the warm drops trickle down his skin, and from his skin she drew into her eyes the saltness of the sea, which made her weep the more. He stroked her hair with a strong but soothing hand, and when she grew calm and lay still in his arms, her emotion spent, he sang quietly to a little enchanting tune a song that began:

I am a Man upon the land,

I am a Selkie in the sea, And when

I'm far from every strand

My home it is on Sule Skerry.

After the first verse or two she freed herself from his embrace, and sitting up listened gravely to the song. Then she asked him, ‘Shall I ever understand?'

‘It's not a unique occurrence,' he told her. ‘It has happened quite often before, as I suppose you know. In Cornwall and Brittany and among the Western Isles of Scotland; that's where people have always been interested in seals, and understood them a little, and where seals from time to time have taken human shape. The one thing that's unique in our case, in my metamorphosis, is that I am the only seal-man who has ever become a Master of Arts of Edinburgh University. Or, I believe, of any university. I am the unique and solitary example of a sophisticated seal-man.'

‘I must look a perfect fright,' she said. ‘It was silly of me to cry. Are my eyes very red?'

‘The lids are a little pink—not unattractively so—but your eyes are as dark and lovely as a mountain pool in October, on a sunny day in October. They're much improved since I threw your spectacles away.'

‘I needed them, you know. I feel quite stupid without them. But tell me why you came to the University—and how? How could you do it?'

‘My dear girl—what is your name, by the way? I've quite forgotten.'

‘Elizabeth!' she said angrily.

‘I'm so glad, it's my favourite human name.—But you don't really want to listen to a lecture on psychobiology?' ‘I want to know
how
. You must tell me!'

‘Well, you remember, don't you, what your book says about the primordial initiatives? But it needs a footnote there to explain that they're not exhausted till quite late in life. The germ-cells, as you know, are always renewing themselves, and they keep their initiatives though they nearly always follow the chosen pattern except in the case of certain illnesses, or under special direction. The direction of the mind, that is. And the glands have got a lot to do in a full metamorphosis, the renal first and then the pituitary, as you would expect. It isn't approved of—making the change, I mean—but every now and then one of us does it, just for a frolic in the general way, but in my case there was a special reason.'

‘Tell me,' she said again.

‘It's too long a story.'

‘I want to know.'

‘There's been a good deal of unrest, you see, among my people in the last few years: doubt, and dissatisfaction with our leaders, and scepticism about traditional beliefs—all that sort of thing. We've had a lot of discussion under the surface of the sea about the nature of man, for instance. We had always been taught to believe certain things about him, and recent events didn't seem to bear out what our teachers told us. Some of our younger people got dissatisfied, so I volunteered to go ashore and investigate. I'm still considering the report I shall have to make, and that's why I'm living, at present, a double life. I come ashore to think, and go back to the sea to rest.'

‘And what do you think of us?' she asked.

‘You're interesting. Very interesting indeed. There are going to be some curious mutations among you before long. Within three or four thousand years, perhaps.'

He stooped and rubbed a little smear of blood from his shin. ‘I scratched it on a limpet,' he said. ‘The limpets, you know, are the same to-day as they were four hundred thousand years ago. But human beings aren't nearly so stable.'

‘Is that your main impression, that humanity's unstable?'

‘That's part of it. But from our point of view there's something much more upsetting. Our people, you see, are quite simple creatures, and because we have relatively few beliefs, we're very much attached to them. Our life is a life of sensation—not entirely, but largely—and we ought to be extremely happy. We were, so long as we were
satisfied with sensation and a short undisputed creed. We have some advantages over human beings, you know. Human beings have to carry their own weight about, and they don't know how blissful it is to be unconscious of weight: to be wave-borne, to float on the idle sea, to leap without effort in a curving wave, and look up at the dazzle of the sky through a smother of white water, or dive so easily to the calmness far below and take a haddock from the weed-beds in a sudden rush of appetite.—Talking of haddocks,' he said, ‘it's getting late. It's nearly time for fish. And I must give you some instruction before we go. The preliminary phase takes a little while, about five minutes for you, I should think, and then you'll be another creature.'

She gasped, as though already she felt the water's chill, and whispered, ‘Not yet! Not yet, please.'

He took her in his arms, and expertly, with a strong caressing hand, stroked her hair, stroked the roundness of her head and the back of her neck and her shoulders, feeling her muscles moving to his touch, and down the hollow of her back to her waist and hips. The head again, neck, shoulders, and spine. Again and again. Strongly and firmly his hand gave her calmness, and presently she whispered, ‘You're sending me to sleep.'