The Diary of a Goose Girl

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THE DIARY OF A GOOSE GIRL


CHAPTER I.


THORNYCROFT FARM, near Barbury Green, July 1, 190-.

In alluding to myself as a Goose Girl, I am using only the most modest of
my titles; for I am also a poultry-maid, a tender of Belgian hares and
rabbits, and a shepherdess; but I particularly fancy the role of Goose
Girl, because it recalls the German fairy tales of my early youth, when I
always yearned, but never hoped, to be precisely what I now am.

As I was jolting along these charming Sussex roads the other day, a fat
buff pony and a tippy cart being my manner of progression, I chanced upon
the village of Barbury Green.

One glance was enough for any woman, who, having eyes to see, could see
with them; but I made assurance doubly sure by driving about a little,
struggling to conceal my new-born passion from the stable-boy who was my
escort. Then, it being high noon of a cloudless day, I descended from
the trap and said to the astonished yokel: "You may go back to the
Hydropathic; I am spending a month or two here. Wait a moment--I'll send
a message, please!"

I then scribbled a word or two to those having me in custody.

"I am very tired of people," the note ran, "and want to rest myself by
living a while with things. Address me (if you must) at Barbury Green
post-office, or at all events send me a box of simple clothing
there--nothing but shirts and skirts, please. I cannot forget that I am
only twenty miles from Oxenbridge (though it might be one hundred and
twenty, which is the reason I adore it), but I rely upon you to keep an
honourable distance yourselves, and not to divulge my place of retreat to
others, especially to--you know whom! Do not pursue me. I will never be
taken alive!"

Having cut, thus, the cable that bound me to civilisation, and having
seen the buff pony and the dazed yokel disappear in a cloud of dust, I
looked about me with what Stevenson calls a "fine, dizzy, muddle-headed
joy," the joy of a successful rebel or a liberated serf. Plenty of money
in my purse--that was unromantic, of course, but it simplified
matters--and nine hours of daylight remaining in which to find a lodging.

The village is one of the oldest, and I am sure it must be one of the
quaintest, in England. It is too small to be printed on the map (an
honour that has spoiled more than one Arcadia), so pray do not look
there, but just believe in it, and some day you may be rewarded by
driving into it by chance, as I did, and feel the same Columbus thrill
running, like an electric current, through your veins. I withhold
specific geographical information in order that you may not miss that
Columbus thrill, which comes too seldom in a world of railroads.

The Green is in the very centre of Barbury village, and all civic,
political, family, and social life converges there, just at the public
duck-pond--a wee, sleepy lake with a slope of grass-covered stones by
which the ducks descend for their swim.

The houses are set about the Green like those in a toy village. They are
of old brick, with crumpled, up-and-down roofs of deep-toned red, and
tufts of stonecrop growing from the eaves. Diamond-paned windows, half
open, admit the sweet summer air; and as for the gardens in front, it
would seem as if the inhabitants had nothing to do but work in them,
there is such a riotous profusion of colour and bloom. To add to the
effect, there are always pots of flowers hanging from the trees, blue
flax and yellow myrtle; and cages of Java sparrows and canaries singing
joyously, as well they may in such a paradise.

The shops are idyllic, too, as if Nature had seized even the man of trade
and made him subservient to her designs. The general draper's, where I
fitted myself out for a day or two quite easily, is set back in a tangle
of poppies and sweet peas, Madonna lilies and Canterbury bells. The shop
itself has a gay awning, and what do you think the draper has suspended
from it, just as a picturesque suggestion to the passer-by? Suggestion I
call it, because I should blush to use the word advertisement in
describing anything so dainty and decorative. Well, then, garlands of
shoes, if you please! Baby bootlets of bronze; tiny ankle-ties in
yellow, blue, and scarlet kid; glossy patent-leather pumps shining in the
sun, with festoons of slippers at the corners, flowery slippers in
imitation Berlin wool-work. If you make this picture in your mind's-eye,
just add a window above the awning, and over the fringe of marigolds in
the window-box put the draper's wife dancing a rosy-cheeked baby. Alas!
my words are only black and white, I fear, and this picture needs a
palette drenched in primary colours.

Along the street, a short distance, is the old watchmaker's. Set in the
hedge at the gate is a glass case with _Multum in Parvo_ painted on the
woodwork. Within, a little stand of trinkets revolves slowly; as slowly,
I imagine, as the current of business in that quiet street. The house
stands a trifle back and is covered thickly with ivy, while over the
entrance-door of the shop is a great round clock set in a green frame of
clustering vine. The hands pointed to one when I passed the watchmaker's
garden with its thicket of fragrant lavender and its murmuring bees; so I
went in to the sign of the "Strong i' the Arm" for some cold luncheon,
determining to patronise "The Running Footman" at the very next
opportunity. Neither of these inns is starred by Baedeker, and this fact
adds the last touch of enchantment to the picture.

The landlady at the "Strong i' the Arm" stabbed me in the heart by
telling me that there were no apartments to let in the village, and that
she had no private sitting-room in the inn; but she speedily healed the
wound by saying that I might be accommodated at one of the farm-houses in
the vicinity. Did I object to a farm-'ouse? Then she could cheerfully
recommend the Evan's farm, only 'alf a mile away. She 'ad understood
from Miss Phoebe Evan, who sold her poultry, that they would take one
lady lodger if she didn't wish much waiting upon.

In my present mood I was in search of the strenuous life, and eager to
wait, rather than to be waited upon; so I walked along the edge of the
Green, wishing that some mentally unbalanced householder would take a
sudden fancy to me and ask me to come in and lodge awhile. I suppose
these families live under their roofs of peach-blow tiles, in the midst
of their blooming gardens, for a guinea a week or thereabouts; yet if
they "undertook" me (to use their own phrase), the bill for my humble
meals and bed would be at least double that. I don't know that I blame
them; one should have proper compensation for admitting a world-stained
lodger into such an Eden.

When I was searching for rooms a week ago, I chanced upon a pretty
cottage where the woman had sometimes let apartments. She showed me the
premises and asked me if I would mind taking my meals in her own dining-
room, where I could be served privately at certain hours: and, since she
had but the one sitting-room, would I allow her to go on using it
occasionally? also, if I had no special preference, would I take the
second-sized bedroom and leave her in possession of the largest one,
which permitted her to have the baby's crib by her bedside? She thought
I should be quite as comfortable, and it was her opinion that in making
arrangements with lodgers, it was a good plan not to "bryke up the 'ome
any more than was necessary."

"Bryke up the 'ome!" That is seemingly the malignant purpose with which
I entered Barbury Green.




CHAPTER II


July 4th.

Enter the family of Thornycroft Farm, of which I am already a member in
good and regular standing.

I introduce Mrs. Heaven first, for she is a self-saturated person who
would never forgive the insult should she receive any lower place.

She welcomed me with the statement: "We do not take lodgers here, nor
boarders; no lodgers, nor boarders, but we do occasionally admit paying
guests, those who look as if they would appreciate the quietude of the
plyce and be willing as you might say to remunerate according."

I did not mind at this particular juncture what I was called, so long as
the epithet was comparatively unobjectionable, so I am a paying guest,
therefore, and I expect to pay handsomely for the handsome appellation.
Mrs. Heaven is short and fat; she fills her dress as a pin-cushion fills
its cover; she wears a cap and apron, and she is so full of platitudes
that she would have burst had I not appeared as a providential outlet for
them. Her accent is not of the farm, but of the town, and smacks wholly
of the marts of trade. She is repetitious, too, as well as
platitudinous. "I 'ope if there's anythink you require you will let us
know, let us know," she says several times each day; and whenever she
enters my sitting-room she prefaces her conversation with the remark: "I
trust you are finding it quiet here, miss? It's the quietude of the
plyce that is its charm, yes, the quietude. And yet" (she dribbles on)
"it wears on a body after a while, miss. I often go into Woodmucket to
visit one of my sons just for the noise, simply for the noise, miss, for
nothink else in the world but the noise. There's nothink like noise for
soothing nerves that is worn threadbare with the quietude, miss, or at
least that's my experience; and yet to a strynger the quietude of the
plyce is its charm, undoubtedly its chief charm; and that is what our
paying guests always say, although our charges are somewhat higher than
other plyces. If there's anythink you require, miss, I 'ope you'll
mention it. There is not a commodious assortment in Barbury Green, but
we can always send the pony to Woodmucket in case of urgency. Our paying
guest last summer was a Mrs. Pollock, and she was by way of having sudden
fancies. Young and unmarried though you are, miss, I think you will tyke
my meaning without my speaking plyner? Well, at six o'clock of a rainy
afternoon, she was seized with an unaccountable desire for vegetable
marrows, and Mr. 'Eaven put the pony in the cart and went to Woodmucket
for them, which is a great advantage to be so near a town and yet 'ave
the quietude."

Mr. Heaven is merged, like Mr. Jellyby, in the more shining qualities of
his wife. A line of description is too long for him. Indeed, I can
think of no single word brief enough, at least in English. The Latin
"nil" will do, since no language is rich in words of less than three
letters. He is nice, kind, bald, timid, thin, and so colourless that he
can scarcely be discerned save in a strong light. When Mrs. Heaven goes
out into the orchard in search of him, I can hardly help calling from my
window, "Bear a trifle to the right, Mrs. Heaven--now to the left--just
in front of you now--if you put out your hands you will touch him."

Phoebe, aged seventeen, is the daughter of the house. She is virtuous,
industrious, conscientious, and singularly destitute of physical charm.
She is more than plain; she looks as if she had been planned without any
definite purpose in view, made of the wrong materials, been badly put
together, and never properly finished off; but "plain" after all is a
relative word. Many a plain girl has been married for her beauty; and
now and then a beauty, falling under a cold eye, has been thought plain.

Phoebe has her compensations, for she is beloved by, and reciprocates the
passion of, the Woodmancote carrier, Woodmucket being the English manner
of pronouncing the place of his abode. If he "carries" as energetically
for the great public as he fetches for Phoebe, then he must be a rising
and a prosperous man. He brings her daily, wild strawberries, cherries,
birds' nests, peacock feathers, sea-shells, green hazel-nuts, samples of
hens' food, or bouquets of wilted field flowers tied together tightly and
held with a large, moist, loving hand. He has fine curly hair of sandy
hue, which forms an aureole on his brow, and a reddish beard, which makes
another inverted aureole to match, round his chin. One cannot look at
him, especially when the sun shines through him, without thinking how
lovely he would be if stuffed and set on wheels, with a little string to
drag him about.

Phoebe confided to me that she was on the eve of loving the postman when
the carrier came across her horizon.

"It doesn't do to be too hysty, does it, miss?" she asked me as we were
weeding the onion bed. "I was to give the postman his answer on the
Monday night, and it was on the Monday morning that Mr. Gladwish made his
first trip here as carrier. I may say I never wyvered from that moment,
and no more did he. When I think how near I came to promising the
postman it gives me a turn." (I can understand that, for I once met the
man I nearly promised years before to marry, and we both experienced such
a sense of relief at being free instead of bound that we came near
falling in love for sheer joy.)

The last and most important member of the household is the Square Baby.
His name is Albert Edward, and he is really five years old and no baby at
all; but his appearance on this planet was in the nature of a complete
surprise to all parties concerned, and he is spoiled accordingly. He has
a square head and jaw, square shoulders, square hands and feet. He is
red and white and solid and stolid and slow-witted, as the young of his
class commonly are, and will make a bulwark of the nation in course of
time, I should think; for England has to produce a few thousand such
square babies every year for use in the colonies and in the standing
army. Albert Edward has already a military gait, and when he has
acquired a habit of obedience at all comparable with his power of
command, he will be able to take up the white man's burden with
distinguished success. Meantime I can never look at him without
marvelling how the English climate can transmute bacon and eggs, tea and
the solid household loaf into such radiant roses and lilies as bloom upon
his cheeks and lips.




CHAPTER III


July 8th.

Thornycroft is by way of being a small poultry farm.

In reaching it from Barbury Green, you take the first left-hand road, go
till you drop, and there you are.

It reminds me of my "grandmother's farm at Older." Did you know the song
when you were a child?--

My grandmother had a very fine farm
'Way down in the fields of Older.
With a cluck-cluck here,
And a cluck-cluck there,
Here and there a cluck-cluck,
Cluck-cluck here and there,
Down in the fields at Older.

It goes on for ever by the simple subterfuge of changing a few words in
each verse.

My grandmother had a very fine farm
'Way down in the fields of Older.
With a quack-quack here,
And a quack-quack there,
Here and there a quack-quack,
Quack-quack here and there,
Down in the fields at Older.

This is followed by the gobble-gobble, moo-moo, baa-baa, etc., as long as
the laureate's imagination and the infant's breath hold good. The tune
is pretty, and I do not know, or did not, when I was young, a more
fascinating lyric.

Thornycroft House must have belonged to a country gentleman once upon a
time, or to more than one; men who built on a bit here and there once in
a hundred years, until finally we have this charmingly irregular and
dilapidated whole. You go up three steps into Mrs. Heaven's room, down
two into mine, while Phoebe's is up in a sort of turret with long, narrow
lattices opening into the creepers. There are crooked little
stair-cases, passages that branch off into other passages and lead
nowhere in particular; I can't think of a better house in which to play
hide and seek on a wet day. In front, what was once, doubtless, a green,
is cut up into greens; to wit, a vegetable garden, where the onions,
turnips, and potatoes grow cosily up to the very door-sill; the
utilitarian aspect of it all being varied by some scarlet-runners and a
scattering of poppies on either side of the path.

The Belgian hares have their habitation in a corner fifty feet distant;
one large enclosure for poultry lies just outside the sweetbrier hedge;
the others, with all the houses and coops, are in the meadow at the back,
where also our tumbler pigeons are kept.

Phoebe attends to the poultry; it is her department. Mr. Heaven has
neither the force nor the _finesse_ required, and the gentle reader who
thinks these qualities unneeded in so humble a calling has only to spend
a few days at Thornycroft to be convinced. Mrs. Heaven would be of use,
but she is dressing the Square Baby in the morning and putting him to bed
at night just at the hours when the feathered young things are undergoing
the same operation.

A Goose Girl, like a poet, is sometimes born, sometimes otherwise. I am
of the born variety. No training was necessary; I put my head on my
pillow as a complicated product of modern civilisation on a Tuesday
night, and on a Wednesday morning I awoke as a Goose Girl.

My destiny slumbered during the day, but at eight o'clock I heard a
terrific squawking in the direction of the duck-ponds, and, aimlessly
drifting in that direction, I came upon Phoebe trying to induce ducks and
drakes, geese and ganders, to retire for the night. They have to be
driven into enclosures behind fences of wire netting, fastened into
little rat-proof boxes, or shut into separate coops, so as to be safe
from their natural enemies, the rats and foxes; which, obeying, I
suppose, the law of supply and demand, abound in this neighbourhood. The
old ganders are allowed their liberty, being of such age, discretion,
sagacity, and pugnacity that they can be trusted to fight their own
battles.

The intelligence of hens, though modest, is of such an order that it
prompts them to go to bed at a virtuous hour of their own accord; but
ducks and geese have to be materially assisted, or I believe they would
roam till morning. Never did small boy detest and resist being carried
off to his nursery as these dullards, young and old, detest and resist
being driven to theirs. Whether they suffer from insomnia, or nightmare,
or whether they simply prefer the sweet air of liberty (and death) to the
odour of captivity and the coop, I have no means of knowing.

Phoebe stood by one of the duck-ponds, a long pole in her hand, and a
helpless expression in that doughlike countenance of hers, where aimless
contours and features unite to make a kind of facial blur. (What does
the carrier see in it?) The pole was not long enough to reach the ducks,
and Phoebe's method lacked spirit and adroitness, so that it was natural,
perhaps, that they refused to leave the water, the evening being warm,
with an uncommon fine sunset.

I saw the situation at once and ran to meet it with a glow of interest
and anticipation. If there is anything in the world I enjoy, it is
making somebody do something that he doesn't want to do; and if, when
victory perches upon my banner, the somebody can be brought to say that
he ought to have done it without my making him, that adds the
unforgettable touch to pleasure, though seldom, alas! does it happen.
Then ensued the delightful and stimulating hour that has now become a
feature of the day; an hour in which the remembrance of the table-d'hote
dinner at the Hydro, going on at identically the same time, only stirs me
to a keener joy and gratitude.

The ducks swim round in circles, hide under the willows, and attempt to
creep into the rat-holes in the banks, a stupidity so crass that it
merits instant death, which it somehow always escapes. Then they come
out in couples and waddle under the wrong fence into the lower meadow,
fly madly under the tool-house, pitch blindly in with the sitting hens,
and out again in short order, all the time quacking and squawking,
honking and hissing like a bewildered orchestra. By dint of splashing
the water with poles, throwing pebbles, beating the shrubs at the pond's
edges, "shooing" frantically with our skirts, crawling beneath bars to
head them off, and prodding them from under bushes to urge them on, we
finally get the older ones out of the water and the younger ones into
some sort of relation to their various retreats; but, owing to their lack
of geography, hatred of home, and general recalcitrancy, they none of
them turn up in the right place and have to be sorted out. We uncover
the top of the little house, or the enclosure as it may be, or reach in
at the door, and, seizing the struggling victim, drag him forth and take
him where he should have had the wit to go in the first instance. The
weak ones get in with the strong and are in danger of being trampled; two
May goslings that look almost full-grown have run into a house with a
brood of ducklings a week old. There are twenty-seven crowded into one
coop, five in another, nineteen in another; the gosling with one leg has
to come out, and the duckling threatened with the gapes; their place is
with the "invaleeds," as Phoebe calls them, but they never learn the
location of the hospital, nor have the slightest scruple about spreading
contagious diseases.

Finally, when we have separated and sorted exhaustively, an operation in
which Phoebe shows a delicacy of discrimination and a fearlessness of
attack amounting to genius, we count the entire number and find several
missing. Searching for their animate or inanimate bodies, we "scoop" one
from under the tool-house, chance upon two more who are being harried and
pecked by the big geese in the lower meadow, and discover one sailing by
himself in solitary splendour in the middle of the deserted pond, a look
of evil triumph in his bead-like eye. Still we lack one young duckling,
and he at length is found dead by the hedge. A rat has evidently seized
him and choked him at a single throttle, but in such haste that he has
not had time to carry away the tiny body.

"Poor think!" says Phoebe tearfully; "it looks as if it was 'it with some
kind of a wepping. I don't know whatever to do with the rats, they're
gettin' that fearocious!"

Before I was admitted into daily contact with the living goose (my
previous intercourse with him having been carried on when gravy and
stuffing obscured his true personality), I thought him a very Dreyfus
among fowls, a sorely slandered bird, to whom justice had never been
done; for even the gentle Darwin is hard upon him. My opinion is
undergoing some slight modifications, but I withhold judgment at present,
hoping that some of the follies, faults, vagaries, and limitations that I
observe in Phoebe's geese may be due to Phoebe's educational methods,
which were, before my advent, those of the darkest ages.




CHAPTER IV


July 9th.

By the time the ducks and geese are incarcerated for the night, the
reasonable, sensible, practical-minded hens--especially those whose
mentality is increased and whose virtue is heightened by the
responsibilities of motherhood--have gone into their own particular rat-
proof boxes, where they are waiting in a semi-somnolent state to have the
wire doors closed, the bricks set against them, and the bits of sacking
flung over the tops to keep out the draught. We have a great many young
families, both ducklings and chicks, but we have no duck mothers at
present. The variety of bird which Phoebe seems to have bred during the
past year may be called the New Duck, with certain radical ideas about
woman's sphere. What will happen to Thornycroft if we develop a New Hen
and a New Cow, my imagination fails to conceive. There does not seem to
be the slightest danger for the moment, however, and our hens lay and sit
and sit and lay as if laying and sitting were the twin purposes of life.

The nature of the hen seems to broaden with the duties of maternity, but
I think myself that we presume a little upon her amiability and natural
motherliness. It is one thing to desire a family of one's own, to lay
eggs with that idea in view, to sit upon them three long weeks and hatch
out and bring up a nice brood of chicks. It must be quite another to
have one's eggs abstracted day by day and eaten by a callous public, the
nest filled with deceitful substitutes, and at the end of a dull and
weary period of hatching to bring into the world another person's
children--children, too, of the wrong size, the wrong kind of bills and
feet, and, still more subtle grievance, the wrong kind of instincts,
leading them to a dangerous aquatic career, one which the mother may not
enter to guide, guard, and teach; one on the brink of which she must ever
stand, uttering dryshod warnings which are never heeded. They grow used
to this strange order of things after a bit, it is true, and are less
anxious and excited. When the duck-brood returns safely again and again
from what the hen-mother thinks will prove a watery grave, she becomes
accustomed to the situation, I suppose. I find that at night she stands
by the pond for what she considers a decent, self-respecting length of
time, calling the ducklings out of the water; then, if they refuse to
come, the mother goes off to bed and leaves them to Providence, or
Phoebe.