Magnus Merriman (25 page)

He drew an excellent picture of Lady Mercy and her endeavour to govern Britain by the distribution of newspapers and free gifts. He ridiculed the idea of Socialism, that offered to build a perfect state on human foundations immeasurably remote from perfection—as though one should endeavour to construct a mansion house of unfired clay—and he derided the new Tory Bankocrats with mordant contempt. He talked, with genial mockery, about compulsory education, and suggested that wisdom lay elsewhere than in spending public money to educate, by the medium of teachers themselves not educated, children whom no power on earth could educate; and he questioned the sagacity of the democratic state that put governing power in the hands of those whom it had thus forcibly misedu-cated. He concluded this part of the poem with the following lines:

One evening while he was working with undiminished energy Janet came through to say that Peter Isbister had come to see him. Magnus, with some reluctance, put down his pen and followed her to the kitchen.

Peter was three or four years younger than Willy, taller, and better-looking. He had brown hair, a brown face, deeply lined, that was constantly changing its expression. He was rather more smartly dressed than Willy, for he wore a collar and tie.

He said, ‘Well, Mansie, have you forgotten your old friends, or got too old to walk up-hill, that you haven't been to the Bu yet?'

Magnus made a few amiable remarks, and said that he had been busy.

‘Man, it canna be good for you, working with books and papers all day,' said Peter. ‘It's maybe no so bad in
the winter, but in this grand weather a body needs to be outside.'

‘It's his own work,' said Janet, ‘and he'll need to do it. He can't be idling all summer when he's just lost three hundred pounds. He'll want to make that up.'

‘I heard tell of that,' said Peter. ‘It was an awful pity to lose all that. But there's many a man lost more than his money through getting mixed up with those politicians, and maybe Mansie won't miss a few pounds nowadays.'

Peter cocked an inquiring eye at Magnus: Janet and Willy listened intently: and the servant-girl paused unobtrusively in the doorway. None of them was greedy, none was dominated by a desire for wealth, but the financial worth of one's acquaintances was a matter of the liveliest interest, and since Magnus's appearance as a Parliamentary candidate it had been said in the countryside that he must have grown very rich.

Magnus grinned at Peter's pointed suggestion. ‘I'm not ruined yet,' he said. ‘But I'd rather have kept the money than lost it.'

Janet and Willy nodded and murmured sympathetically. ‘Just so, just so,' said Peter. And the servant-girl vanished from the doorway. Magnus's answer had satisfied them: it seemed that he was not foolishly rich, but as he could lose three hundred pounds without apparent distress he was plainly a sound man: and they could still speculate on the precise degree of his soundness.

The conversation turned to other subjects. Peter was a good talker, full of genial gossip, and the whole parish came to life in his stories. Magnus listened to his tales of good fortune and ill-fortune, of crops and cattle, and found no desire to break in with reminiscences of India and America. Most of the people whom Peter mentioned were known to Magnus, and the names of their farms—Buckquoy, Nistaben, Northbigging, Settiscarth, Overabist, and the like—conjured familiar pictures of snug steadings and brown hillside and fat beasts in the yard. There was enough close-woven interest here to make a man independent of the outer world. And Peter had the Orkney lilt in his voice more noticeably than Willy or Janet: a light
and lively cadence very different from the Scottish tongue, a cheerful unsentimental cadence, a lilt that gave point to the half-ironical flavour of Orkney humour. Peter, he decided, was a fine fellow: full of schemes and gossip: he told a story for the interest or amusement inherent in it, not because he had a grudge against the man of whom he told it: and his busyness was due to a restless desire to make use of all his faculties.

The following afternoon Magnus paid his long-delayed visit to the Bu. Peter's farm lay on the hillside a couple of miles east of Midhouse. Magnus walked across country to it. He went by the north end of the small reedy loch, where the coots and the black-headed gulls were nesting, and came to a narrow road leading uphill. Primroses grew thickly in the deep ditch beside it, and smaller flowers in the long grass made circlets of colour. The wind blew lightly in a field of young corn, rippling into faint blue shadows its gay and tender green. Starlings were busy in a clump of gorse-bushes and about an old loose dyke. A herd of black cattle stopped their grazing and looked sombrely at Magnus as he walked among them. In a field some distance away half a dozen men and women were singling turnips: they stood in a line diagonal to the long parallel drills: their movement down the field was scarcely perceptible.

In a paddock below the Bu there was a brisk and lively scene. A girl was struggling with two calves that plunged and kicked at the end of their tethers. They ran in opposite directions and she stood with her arms at full stretch and shouted to them. The calves turned inwards, met, and set off on a new line, prancing side by side. The girl pulled against them. She was lithe and slender, and her body arched like a bow. Now the calves turned stubborn and would not budge. The girl hauled like a bargee on a rope, and her breasts showed their firm and pleasant shape under her blouse.

Magnus came near, laughing. ‘Hallo,' he said. ‘You're Rose, aren't you? There's none of the others could have grown so lovely.'

‘Oh, stow!' [an expletive: it rhymes with
plough
] she said. ‘Here, take hold of this tether.'

Magnus took the dirty rope and hauled the nearer calf
to the other side of the paddock. Rose followed, and they knocked the stakes of the tethers into the ground with a heavy stone. Magnus wiped his hands on the grass.

After her first brusque demand for help Rose appeared to have become shy. She stood awkwardly for a moment or two, and then, as if striving to make conversation, said, ‘That's the first time for many a year you've had sharn on your fingers.'

‘I suppose so,' Magnus answered without paying much attention to what she said. She had been a nice-looking child, he remembered, but not so nice-looking as to promise prettiness so uncommon as this. Her hair was black, curling and untidy in the breeze, and her face was flushed by her struggle with the calves. She was of medium height and slim. Her features were fine, her teeth perfect, and her eyes a curious blue-green under long dark lashes. Her cheeks were delicately coloured, and the texture of her skin—her arms and neck were bare—was flawless. Magnus found it difficult to look away from her.

But Rose did nothing to encourage his admiration, for she grew embarrassed under his stare and said nervously, ‘You'll be coming in, won't you?'

‘Yes, I'm coming in,' said Magnus, and followed her into the house.

Mary Isbister, Rose's mother, was in the kitchen, baking. She welcomed Magnus with floury hands and immediately began to gossip with great animation. Rose left them and went upstairs. Presently other members of the family came in: there was a tall strong silent boy called Alec, a girl called Peggy, a couple of younger ones. The family had diminished since Magnus had last been there, for one of the sons had gone to Canada, one to New Zealand, and the eldest girl was married in another parish.

Peter arrived when tea was ready and said, ‘Well, Mansie, you've found your way here at last, have you?' Mary Isbister continued the theme, and said she had been thinking that maybe Magnus had grown too grand to come and see them now, but, ‘Faith,' she said, ‘he hasna changed so much after all. I took a look through the window, and there he was flitting the calves with Rose, and a sharny old
rope in his hands as though he'd been wont with nothing else.'

Rose came down to tea and sat so quietly that her mother made some remark about her silence.

‘Say nothing to rouse her,' said Peter. ‘Let sleeping dogs lie.'

Alec and Peggy and the younger children laughed as if at some private joke, and Rose flushed uncomfortably. She had brushed her hair, and looked very pretty and neat despite her working clothes. She scarcely spoke throughout the meal.

After tea Peter took Magnus out to see his beasts. He bred pure Aberdeen-Angus cattle, and he looked with a lover's eye at their broad flat backs, their square sterns, the tail hanging like a whip-lash, the silky hide, and the short straight legs. Magnus caught his enthusiasm and discovered for himself the beauty of good breeding, and became aware of the delectable quest for perfection of breeding. His peasant ancestry came to life in him, and he felt their urgent desire for land of their own, for beasts of their own. To have black cattle like Peter's, moreover, would give him an aesthetic satisfaction almost as great as the peasant-satisfaction in possessing land. He saw himself breeding a bull—broad of head, mighty of dewlap, shouldered like Atlas—such as the islands had never seen.

As if divining his thoughts Peter said, ‘Man, you should buy a farm of your own and settle down in Orkney. You've seen as much of the world as you need to, and you've made some money: you could buy a fine tidy farm, stock it well, and be your own master. You won't make a fortune, but there's a lot of satisfaction in breeding a good beast now and then, and getting your harvest in. And there's always something newcome in a farm. Look at that field there: I drained it the year afore last and there's grass in it now to feed twice the number of kye.'

But Magnus was hardly ready yet to admit his new and delicate imaginings. They were still dreamlike and vague. They would not support details so material as field-draining. He answered, ‘I'm writing a poem, a long one, and that must be finished before I can think of anything else.'

‘There'd be time enough for your poetry in the winter, in
the long evenings,' said Peter. ‘Summer's no time at all for writing books.'

But Magnus was filled with the fury of working, and in the morning he returned to his poem with eagerness undiminished. The excitement of composition made his pulses beat as though, in some street-scuffling, he had been challenged to fight. And by midnight he would be drained of strength and weary to the bone.

He added half a dozen political portraits to the first part of his poem. One was of the Prime Minister:

The satirical half of
The Returning Sun
, then, was when finished a fine gallimaufry. The body of it was the dismal and lifeless condition of Scotland, but its limbs stretched out in all directions. Here, resounding as a slap in the face, was a passage on modern love; and there, loud as a guffaw, were twenty lines on modern religion. The League of Nations, armament firms, newspaper advertisements, Soviet
Russia, Mr Gandhi, and international tennis tournaments were saluted with a catcall and dismissed with derision. Yet, tempting as these diversions were, they never obscured the principal theme: Magnus's general iconoclasm was only a frame for his Scottish satire, and his excursions abroad were no more than chapter-headings for his denunciation of Scotland's insufficiency. He avoided the tone of a Jeremiad by the gusto of his satire, and all his raiding and spoiling he did with unfailing pleasure.

But when he came to write the second half of the poem he found many obstacles: for the latter part was to be constructive, and constructive criticism is regrettably more difficult than detraction and the buffeting of robust disapprobation. He began with an evening vision of the western sea: the poet, standing on a cliff, was watching the great orb of the sun drop down the sky with all its company of roseate clouds and golden mists, draining the firmament of colour like a tyrant's court that bleeds an empire for its finery; down to a handsbreadth from the stiff horizon came the sun, and the wall of the cold sea was ready to obscure it: but like some aureate bird, fat, and with feathers of flame, the sun perched on top of the wall, its circle flattening somewhat with its weight, and then, rebounding slowly, rose again, and the chorus of pink-breasted clouds and the mists with their golden wings applauded it, and the sky grew bright once more to welcome it. Now that vision was intended to symbolize the returning pride and vigour of Scotland, but how to fulfil the vision and equip it with practical details gave Magnus no little trouble. That renascence should come from the west suggested, of course, a Celtic character for it, and the Celtic ethos was a fine opponent to the decadent commercialism of Scotland and the world at large. But as an Orkney man Magnus did not wholly trust the Celtic spirit, and was resolved that his renascence should be stiffened by certain Norse characteristics. And this cross-breeding, this mixture of the spiritual and the practical, presented several difficulties.

One afternoon the conflict between the two ideas grew so disturbing that he could not sit still, but went walking at a great pace over fields till he came to the main road,
and down that with long strides and a scowl on his face, muttering odd lines and half-made phrases, and striving to see consistency in a crowd of inconsistent images. He was interrupted by a voice, intoning its words in a very different fashion from the Orkney style, that asked him what o'clock it was.

He looked round and saw, in an old grass-overgrown quarry by the roadside, a tinker's camp. The man who had spoken to him, a tall dark-faced fellow, stood beside a little black tent, and at his feet a thin unhappy-looking dog was rubbing its stern on the ground. Magnus told him the time. A buxom woman with rusty-red hair and a child in her arms came out of the tent. ‘It's a fine day,' she said in a high-leaping voice. Magnus fell into conversation with them. ‘Do you know anything that will take worms out of a dog?' said the man. Magnus said there were certain pills for that purpose, but he could not remember the name of them. ‘I've heard that if you grind up some broken glass and put it in the dog's food, that will do good,' said the woman. Magnus doubted it. The man suggested other remedies, and the dog lay down, and looked mournfully at them. ‘It's a poor thing of a dog anyway,' said the woman.

The topic died and Magnus continued his walk. The tinkers were old acquaintances: their name was Macafee. He remembered with sudden delight a conversation in Edinburgh, in Rothesay Crescent, and Mrs Wishart's asking if he knew the So-and-so's and the What's-their-names in Orkney—the eminent So-and-so's and the very dignified What's-their-names—and he had countered, in the same tone of social inquisitioning, ‘Do you know the Macafees and the Newlands?' Tinkers all, and ‘charming people', he had said. He imagined himself introducing Mrs Wishart to the woman with rusty-red hair. The tinker woman would not be disconcerted, but Mrs Wishart would be sadly ill-at-ease, especially if she had to listen to the description of the worm that had once been driven out of a greyhound—so the tinkers said—by a dose of chopped horsehair.

Unfortunately from thinking of Mrs Wishart his thoughts took an awkward turn and Frieda stepped into the picture. Ten days after his arrival in Orkney a letter had come from
her, addressed to him care of his publishers and forwarded by them. It was an unpleasant letter, full of upbraiding and sorrow. He had torn it up immediately after reading it and sought refuge in work from her wounding phrases and more painful reiteration of affection. He had meant to be brutal and ignore her letters. But his resolution had wavered and weakened when he could find no peace in his work, and that night he had replied to her at great length, offering in his own defence nothing but a distaste for marriage—incurable, he said—and protesting his remorse for the unhappiness he had caused her. He endeavoured to word his letter so that it would minister to her self-esteem and restore her self-respect, and at the same time he contrived to give it a tone of finality. Since then he had not heard from her, and the importunate demands that his poem made upon him gave him little time to think of her. Instead of whipping himself with contrition, as in idleness he would have done, he had been contentedly whipping the abuses of the day with satire. But occasionally unwelcome thoughts penetrated the armour of his preoccupation, and now, with the day so fine about him and the fields so greenly prosperous on either side, he felt the weight of Frieda's unhappiness, and swore again that he would traffic no more in love, since love always came with unbidden guests to wish it ill, like witches at a christening.

He walked to Dounby, the nearest village, and stayed to talk with the blacksmith, who was shoeing a big white-footed mare. He leaned against the wall of the smithy and watched the paring of the mare's feet. Presently he saw a cyclist on the road, and when she came near he recognized Rose, and was aware of a little surge of excited pleasure. She smiled as she passed, and a hundred yards further on he saw her dismount at one of the village shops. Ten minutes later she returned, and would have ridden by. But Magnus called to her to stop.

She had a heavy basket on the handlebars of her bicycle. Magnus said good-bye to the blacksmith and walked back with Rose. At first he found it difficult to make her talk, and when her initial reserve was broken down she still spoke shyly, with sidelong glances to see if her conversation was
approved. It was family stuff, domestic matters, and country topics she spoke of. She had no wit and only the most elementary appreciation of humour, but her voice was young and her shyness engaging. Magnus, without deliberately intending a comparison, found himself contrasting her with Frieda. He had never reconciled himself, wholly and with comfort, to Frieda's background of too-lavish experience, and in Rose's simplicity he found the freedom of relief. The timid bait of innocency attracted him—that May-fly on the stream of time—and the longer he looked at her the more he was convinced that she was uncommonly pretty. In particular his admiration was captured by her complexion, and in a little while he was unwise enough to interrupt her story of what her mother had said to James of Buckquoy's wife, and tell her so.

Rose fell silent immediately, and charmingly blushed, and Magnus never heard what James Buckquoy's wife had said in reply.

But having started to talk about her prettiness he found the theme engaging, and enlarged on it till Rose grew patently unhappy and begged him to stop.

‘But I'm only telling you the truth,' he said.

‘You're not,' she answered. ‘It's nothing but a lot of lies. I think you'd better give me the basket now: you've come far enough.'

They had reached the farm-road leading to the Bu. Rose, flushed with embarrassment, reached for the basket that Magnus had been carrying, but Magnus, who was enjoying himself, said, ‘Think of your nose, for example …'

‘I won't,' said Rose, and snatched the basket from him.

‘All right,' said Magnus. ‘If you don't believe me, look in the mirror and see what it has to say.'

That night he could make nothing of Scotland's renascence, and added not a line to
The Returning Sun
. But he thought of Rose, and the more he thought of her the more she excited him, till at last he wrote, quick-fingered, a set of verses that might very well do for an autograph-album, and they gave him even more pleasure than the stabbing couplets of his satire: