Free The Goose Girl and Other Stories by Eric Linklater Page A

attractive was a mermaid story that the afternoon tide told. Even the sand had a story, but it was so old that the Peerie Men themselves could not understand it, for it began in darkness and finished under a green haze of ice; and since the Pomfrets were so busy there they heard no sound of the chauffeur’s visit and the Peerie Men said nothing of it. They had taken below all the rugs and cushions and hampers and gramophone records, and brushed the grass straight, so that no trace was left of the Midsummer dancing—except the tag of Joan’s stocking-suspender, which was overlooked, so it seems.
    â€˜The old grey seal told them, in the days that followed, of all that was going on by land, and even Mrs Pomfret laughed to hear of the bustle and stir they had created. There was no need, the Peerie Men found, to make them hide when more searchers came, for none of the Pomfrets had any wish to be found. Disney said he was learning something about the sea for the first time in his life (and he had followed the sea all his life), and Norah sang Iceland cradle-songs all day. Old Pomfret swilled his ale, glowing like a ruby in the green cave, and Joan—Joan was the queen of the Peerie Men, and the fosterling of the old grumbling sand, and the friend of every fish that passed by the sea-door. And at night they danced, to the music of the tree-rootfiddles and pink shell-drums, and above all to that music which you think was made by Grieg. They danced, I tell you!’
    The young man tossed up his arms and touched his fingers above his head; he placed the flat of his foot on the calf of the other leg; twirled rapidly on his toes. ‘Danced, I say! Is there anything in the world but dancing?’ And he clapped his heels together, high in the air, first to one side and then to the other, singing something fast and rhythmic and melodious.
    Mr Pinto coughed nervously—he was feeling cold—and said: ‘That is an extraordinarily interesting story. But, if you will pardon my curiosity, do you mind telling me what reason you have for thinking that this actually happened to Mr Pomfret and his friends?’
    â€˜Reason!’ said the young man, staring at him. His hair blew out on the wind like a black banner, and he laughed loud and melodiously.
    â€˜This reason,’ he said, ‘that I am Otto Samways!’ And he turned, very neatly, a standing somersault on the deck and came up laughing.
    â€˜They sent me away to buy something,’ he said, ‘and when I have bought it I am going back to Eynhallow to dance the Merry Men, and the Herring Dance, and the Sea Moon’s Dance with Joan.’
    And once again he sang, very melodiously, and turned a rapid series of catherine-wheels along the deck.
    â€˜To buy what?’ shouted Mr Pinto, as he disappeared.
    â€˜Gramophone needles!’ bellowed the young man, laughing uproariously.

Sealskin Trousers
    Iam Not Mad. It is necessary to realise that, to accept it as a fact about which there can be no dispute. I have been seriously ill for some weeks, but that was the result of shock. A double or conjoint shock: for as well as the obvious concussion of a brutal event, there was the more dreadful necessity of recognising the material evidence of a happening so monstrously implausible that even my friends here, who in general are quite extraordinarily kind and understanding, will not believe in the occurrence, though they cannot deny it or otherwise explain—I mean explain away—the clear and simple testimony of what was left.
    I, of course, realised very quickly what had happened, and since then I have more than once remembered that poor Coleridge teased his unquiet mind, quite unnecessarily in his case, with just such a possibility; or impossibility, as the world would call it. ‘If a man could pass through Paradise in a dream,’ he wrote, ‘and have a flower presented to him as a pledge that his soul had really been there,