Gosling

“ Blanche took little notice of them; she was struggling perplexedly with the problems of life. Mrs Gosling’s presence was negligible.
“That was a very handsome fellow in the carriage,” remarked Mrs Isaacson suddenly, “I think you do well not to go near that place again.” Her fine eyes fixedly regarded the broad, rusty back of Mrs Gosling and the broken ribs of her umbrella.
Millie simpered. “Oh! I should be safe enough. His wife’d see to that.”
“She was not his wife,” returned Mrs Isaacson. “Men would not marry now that they are so few.” ”

“ In the first place, he wondered why those horses of Boost’s had not been used for food; in the second, he wondered why he had not seen a single man during the whole of the long trek from Brondesbury to Putney. By degrees an unbelievable explanation presented itself: no men were left. He remembered that the few needy-looking women he had seen had looked at him curiously; in retrospect he fancied their regard had had some quality of amazement. Gosling scratched the bristles of his ten-days’-old beard and smoked thoughtfully. ”

“ I want you to tell me, were there any young men in London when you left? You haven’t seen any young man who at all resembles this photograph, have you?”
Mrs Gosling stared at the silver-framed photograph which Mrs Pollard took from the table at her side, stared and shook her head.
“We haven’t seen a single man of any kind for two months,” said Blanche, “not a single one. Have we, Millie?” ”

“ Gosling was not to be done out of his argument. “Very like,” he said. “But now, just supposin’ as this ’ere plague did spread to London, and ’alf the men couldn’t go to work; where d’you fancy you’d be?”
Mrs Gosling was unable to grasp the intricacies of this abstraction. “Well, of course, every one knows as we couldn’t get on without the men,” she said.
“Ah! well there you are, got it in once,” said Gosling. “And don’t you gels forget it,” he added turning to his daughters.
Millie only giggled, but Blanche said, “All right, dad, we won’t.” ”

“ After her disappointment in Pinner, Mrs Gosling’s interest in life began rapidly to decline. Seated in her truck, she fell into long fits of brooding on the past. She was too old and too stereotyped to change, the future held no hope for her, and as the meaning and purpose of her existence faded, the life forces within her surely and ever more rapidly ebbed. Reality to her became the discomfort of the sun’s heat, the dust of the road, the creak and scream [203] of the trolly wheels. ”

“ The two girls were busy with a sheet of note-paper and a stump of pencil that seemed to require frequent lubrication; they were making calculations.
“This one’s quite new, seemingly,” returned Gosling. “It’s only the men as get it.” [10]
“No need for us to worry, then,” put in Millie, more as a duty, some slight return for benefits promised, than because she took any interest in the subject. Blanche was absorbed; her unseeing gaze was fixed on the mantelpiece and ever and again she removed the point of the pencil from her mouth and wrote feverishly.
“Oh, ain’t there?” replied Gosling. ”

“ Then the two goslings went away and found a man who had a load of hay. They said to him: "Good man, do us the kindness to give us a little of that hay to build a house with, so that the wolf shall not eat us!" "Yes, yes, yes, take some, take some!" And he gave them as much as they wanted. The goslings, well pleased, thanked the man and carried the hay to a meadow and built a very pretty little house, prettier than the other. The middle-sized gosling said to the smallest: "Listen. I am going now to see whether one is comfortable in this house; but I will not act like our sister, you know!" ”

“ But the whole journey had been conducted in a spirit of fear; they had been defending their food, their lives; they had been primitive creatures ready to fight desperately at the smallest provocation.
“No man left,” said Gosling to himself, and was not convinced. If that indeed were the solution of his perplexity, he was faced with an awful corollary; his own time would come. He thought of Barbican, E.C., of Flack, of Messrs Barker and Prince, of the office staff, and the office itself. ”

“ Gosling’s whole position, a general air of complacency, good-temper and comfort.
Gosling was an easy-going man, he hated rows.
“Mind you, you two,” he remarked with a return to facetiousness as he settled himself with his carpet slippers spread out to the fire—“mind you, I look on this money as an investment. You two gels got to get married; and quick or I shall be in the bankrup’cy Court. Don’t you forget as these ‘fal-lals’ is bought for a purpose.”
“Oh, don’t be so horrid, father,” said Blanche, with a change of front; “it sounds as if we were setting traps for men.” ”

“ They were always wanting money for “fal-lals.”
He adopted his usual line of defence through dinner and constantly brought the subject of conversation back to the need for a reduction of expenses. He did not see Blanche wink at Millie across the table, during these strategic exercises; nor catch the glance of understanding which passed between [7] the girls and their mother. So, as his dinner comforted and cheered him, Gosling began to relax into his usual facetiousness ”

“ At the mention of the house in Wisteria Grove, Mrs Gosling sighed noticeably. She was by no means satisfied with the place at Putney, and she could not rid herself of the idea that there must be accessible gas and water in Kilburn, as there had always been.
“Well, you might go up there one day and ’ave a look at the place,” she put in. “It’s quite likely they’ve got things goin’ again up there.”
In less than an hour Blanche and Millie had made themselves presentable. Life had begun to stir again in humanity. The atmosphere of horror which the [132] plague had brought was being lifted. ”

“ What?” remarked Gurney.
“Good for society as a whole, apparently,” replied Thrale, “but surely not good for the man. I’ve told you that I have seen glimmerings of the god in him, but outside the routine of his work the man’s mind is clogged. He’s not much over fifty, and he has no outlet, now, for his desires. He’s like a man with choked pores, and his body is poisoned. And in this particular Gosling is certainly no exception either to his class or to the great mass of civilized man. ”

“ When they are hatched the goslings are suffered to remain with their mother for five days, and then daily, when the weather is fine, they are driven out to the meadows or to the ponds or some swampy place. The gosling houses may be built either above or below ground, but never more than twenty should be housed together and care must be taken lest the floor be damp and that they are bedded on chaff or some thing of that kind, and that the house is so constructed as to keep out weasels and other beasts which prey on goslings. ”

“ Blanche, duster in hand, appeared at the doorway.
“Why doesn’t he go himself?” she asked.
“Because,” replied her father, getting very red, [103] and speaking with elaborate care, “men’s subject to the infection and women is not.”
“That’s all my eye,” returned Millie. “Lots of women have got it.”
“It’s well known,” said Gosling, still keeping himself in hand, “a matter of common knowledge, that women is comparatively immune.”
“Oh, that’s a man’s yarn, that is,” said Blanche, “just to save themselves. We all know what men are—selfish brutes!” ”

“ Mrs Gosling looked shocked. “I ’ope my gels’ll never come to that,” she said. Her girls, with a wonderful understanding of their mother’s opinions, had omitted to mention their raid on the Knightsbridge emporium.
“No one’d ever know,” said Millie.
“There’s One who would,” replied Mrs Gosling [152] gravely, and strangely enough, perhaps, the two girls looked uneasy, but they were thinking less of the commandments miraculously given to Moses than of the probable displeasure of the Vicar of St John the Evangelist’s Church in Kilburn. ”

“ You can’t eat money, nor wear it, nor use it to light a fire. Now, if you’d offered me a box of matches, you should have had all the milk I can spare.”
“Well, I never,” put in Mrs Gosling, who had [166] feebly come to rest again on the handle of the trolly.
“No, my good woman, you never did,” said the stranger. “You never could and I should say the chances are that you never will.”
Millie was intimidated and shrinking, even Blanche looked a little nervous, but Mrs Gosling was incapable of feeling fear of a fellow-woman. “You can’t mean as you won’t sell us a glass of milk?” she said. ”

“ When she returned to the Putney house, Mrs Gosling wept and wished she, too, was dead, but she consented at last to Blanche’s continually urged proposition, in so far as she expressed herself willing to make a move of some sort. She thought they might, at least, go back and have a look at Wisteria Grove. And if Kilburn had, indeed, fallen as low as Hammersmith, then there was apparently no help for it and they must try their luck in the waste and desolation of the country. Perhaps some farmer’s wife might take them in for a time, until they had a chance to look about them. ”

“ Some dim consciousness of this came to Blanche.
They had spoken little as they ate—Mrs Gosling would touch nothing but milk, and Mrs Isaacson strove desperately and with some success to control the greed that showed in the concentrated eagerness of her eyes and the grasping crook of her fingers—and when they had finished, lingering in the relief of the shade, they were still silent. It seemed as if the [217] first word spoken must necessarily hasten the continuation of their journey. ”

“ The goslings could hunt for their breakfasts almost as well as their mother, while little Red Hen had to scratch up every thing her children ate. And as for the water--well, the chicks were simply not in it there! They did not like to be in the water at all, but the goslings loved their morning bath in the brook better than anything else in the whole day. ”

“ Swain may go back to the father of Canute, or to some hoary-headed swain who, possibly, tended the swine. Not all the Seymours are St. Maurs. Some of them were once Seamers, i.e. tailors. Gosling is rather trivial, but it represents the romantic Jocelyn, in Normandy Gosselin, a diminutive of the once very popular personal name Josse. Goss is usually for goose, but any Goss, or Gossett, unwilling to trace his family back to John Goose, "my lord of Yorkes fole," [Footnote: Privy Purse Expenses of Elizabeth of York (1502) .] ”

“ The Goslings found a use for her when they came to the drop of Amersham Hill, going down into High Wycombe. Blanche proposed that Mrs Gosling should walk down, but the old lady did not seem to understand her. She looked perplexed and kept saying, “I don’t remember this road. Are you sure we’re goin’ right, Blanche?”
“Ah! she must not walk in this heat,” put in Mrs [215] Isaacson. “We three can manage very well.” And, indeed, although she manifestly suffered greatly from the exertion, the Jewess was of very great assistance in retarding the speed of the trolly as they made the perilous descent. ”

“ Gosling was willing to exchange certain advantages of knowledge and possession for the hire of wagons and horses. It was decided, for obvious [100] reasons, to admit no other conspirator into the plot, and Boost, the coal merchant, drove one cart and Gosling drove the other. Perhaps it should rather be said that he led the other, for, after a preliminary trial, he decided that he was safer at the horses’ heads than behind their tails.
The raid was conducted with perfect success. Boost had a head for essentials. ”

“ Now both of them ran over to the well, and Big Beate helped her little friend to get her legs firmly fixed between the logs that were around the well, so that she might sit in comfort and watch the [35] little goslings swim about on the water. Then gosling after gosling was dropped down, and as soon as each one reached the water it seemed to become alive and it moved about. Oh, what fun! Big Beate clapped her hands to the pretty little downy birds, and when she helped Little Beate a bit, she too could clap her hands. ”

“ 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 Phœbe calls them, but they never learn the location of the hospital, nor have the slightest scruple about spreading contagious diseases. ”

“ The cow acknowledged her presence by an indolent toss of the head.
“Oh! but my sweet Alice!” protested the young woman; “you must move and let these funny people come in. It really isn’t good for you, dear, to stand about in the sun like this, and you’d much better go and lie down in the shade for a bit!” She gently pulled the gate from under the cow’s chin, and then, [175] laying her hands flat on its side, made as if to push it out of the way.
“Well, I never!” declared Mrs Gosling, regarding the performance with much the same awe as she might have vouchsafed to a lion-tamer in a circus. ”

“ The goosey-gander stood in the doorway and looked into the cow shed.
"There's not a soul in here," he said. "Come along, Dunfin, and you shall see the goose pen. Don't be afraid; there's no danger."
Forthwith the goosey-gander, Dunfin, and all six goslings waddled into the goose pen, to have a look at the elegance and comfort in which the big white gander had lived before he joined the wild geese. ”