Magnus Merriman (26 page)

The Returning Sun
became more and more unmanageable, and Magnus's vision of a resurgent Scotland was elusive as a unicorn when he strove to describe it in compact lines and detailed phrase. He toiled and sweated and chased his fleeting thoughts as unsuccessfully as an old sheepdog in pursuit of a young hare. He cursed his empty wrestling with shadows, his vain huckstering with words that only a merchant-prince like Milton, a royal spendthrift like Shakespeare, a fortuned favourite like Shelley, could dare to throw on the counter, and he swore he would abandon poetry for ever and be a farmer instead, as Peter urged him to be—and the more he cursed and abominated his craft the more he bent his shoulders in its service.

But when the time came that hay was ripe, and Willy of
Midhouse had had his reaper-knife sharpened, and yoked his horses for cutting, Magnus felt the compulsion of the seasons more cogent than the perennial claims of poetry, and put away his manuscript and took instead a hayfork, excusing his recusancy with the misquotation—that none but himself appreciated—
Poetam furca expellas, tamen usque
recurret
.

For a day he worked stoutly, coling the cut hay, and found that he remembered how to make the coles weather-proof and fit to run the rain. Then he was allowed to drive the reaper, and took a vast delight in its straight progress down the field, in the steady falling of the grass, the hard stammering sound of the knife, the rhythmical forward-lurch and backward-thrust with which he pushed off the gathered swathes.

A steady breeze blew, drying the harvest, and the hay was hardly cut and coled before it was ready for carting. Then Magnus worked mightily, forking huge trusses to the waiting carts and sweating prodigiously as the loads grew higher, and each forkfull—ponderous, shaggy in the wind—had to be thrust up as far as he could reach, turned inwards, and released from the prongs with a last jerk of the wrist. Hay-seeds stuck to his sweating forehead, hayseeds descended his sweating back and chest, but the sweet smell of the hay filled his nostrils, the blue loch lay below him, the strong horses strained to the load, the larks rose singing to the sky. He found contentment and laughter in his companionship with Willy and the ploughman, with Johnny the ploughman's boy and Maggie Jean the servant-girl, and happily shared with them the ale of Janet's brewing that was brought down to the field and passed from mouth to mouth in a blue quart-mug.

They built their hay at Midhouse before carting began at the Bu, and Magnus, pluming himself on the strength that he had scarcely used for years, took his fork and went to help Peter. Peter had all his family in the field, and Magnus contrived to work beside Rose. She wore an old shapeless hat tied under her chin with a scarf to keep the hayseeds out of her hair; her frock was dingy and soiled; her stockings were thick and her boots course country leather. She was
strong, and she hoisted aloft great loads of hay with tireless vigour. ‘Have you looked in the mirror yet?' said Magnus, and Rose, with simple percipience, answered, ‘I think you're silly.' But she was conquering her shyness, and presently she asked, ‘What have you done with all your fine clothes?' For when she had first seen him Magnus had been dressed in smart tweeds, finely tailored, and now he wore a grey flannel shirt and old corduroy trousers. The sun had given a rusty light to his dark hair, his face was red, and two days' stubble of beard was on his chin. ‘Fine clothes are a vanity,' said Magnus. ‘I'm a son of the soil, dirty and virtuous, shining with simple piety and sweat. I'm going to buy a farm and breed black cattle, and every Saturday night I'll change my shirt and shave my beard and come and make love to you.' ‘You'll find the door locked,' said Rose, no longer so shy, and led the horse to the next cole.

At one o'clock they went in for their dinner, and sat crowded round the table. Mary Isbister put plates of thick broth before them, untidy ends of mutton and boiled potatoes, and bere bread and rhubarb jam. Then they went back to the field. Unclouded and bright, the sun shone down, and the west wind, blowing over meadowlands below, carried the smell of grass and wild honey. Peggy brought ale to them and Magnus drank thirstily. He and Rose forked up another cole, and Alec, who was building the load, cried that was enough. Magnus undid the ropes from the back of the cart and threw them up to Alec, who passed them diagonally over the load. Magnus caught hold of the ends, heaved and strained, and tied them to the shafts. Alec slid down and led the horse away, and the unwieldy load went jolting and swaying over the brig-stones.

Magnus and Rose sat down beneath a cole, and now Magnus, yielding to his inclinations, to the heartiness of the day, and indeed to common sense, put his arm round her shoulders and leaned over to kiss her. But Rose thrust him away and would have nothing to do with embraces. For a moment it seemed that now her shyness had gone indeed and that she was going to be most unbashfully angry. But the little flame of temper sank, and she held him off with pleading instead. After they had loaded another cart Magnus
tried again, and now, though still she would not suffer to be kissed, she did not seem offended by the attempt to kiss her. And when they had piled-high yet another cart they sat beneath a haycock that overleaned the burn—running brown with silver streaks between meadowsweet and reeds—and now Rose resisted less strenuously, and was kissed, not wholly complaisant but uncomplaining, upon the nose and brow. So for the rest of the day they worked, lifting great loads and kissing under the haycocks, heaving on the binding-ropes, and holding each other's hot and blistered hands.

For some time Magnus lost interest in his poem and became so rustically-minded that Janet found his presence in the house embarrassing. He cleaned the stables and smelt strongly of dung, he spoke with an Orkney accent, he discussed the rotation of crops and talked lengthily of manures and wild white clover, he inquired into the pedigrees of cattle and horses till often the kitchen at Midhouse seemed full of leaping stallions, philoprogenitive bulls, and amorous tups, and the whole countryside opened wide in ceaseless fecundity. When the sow farrowed it was Magnus who sat up with her and helped her in her labour, and presently he took to eating with his knife. Then Janet spoke harshly to him, and told him that was no way to behave, and said that if he wanted to live in her house he must mend his manners. But Willy was delighted with his new-found enthusiasm, for Magnus worked so hard on the farm that there was little left for Willy to do but to stand and watch, and contemplate the increasing girth of his stirks, the rising height of his corn, and the burgeoning of his turnips. And that suited him very well indeed.

After the hay had been built there were peats to be brought from the hill. The carts set out in the early morning, a slow procession, creaking on the road. The hill-tracks were rough with boulders and deep ruts that sent the carts lurching from side to side. Sometimes they startled a covey of young grouse, sometimes a leaping hare. Then they came to the peat-banks, and loading began. The upper peat was dusty and brown, but that dug deeper was solid blue-black, solid and heavy. With full loads in the carts the men had to walk
the five miles back to Midhouse. From early morning till evening they came and went, and slowly the Midhouse peat-stack grew to a proper size for winter fires.

On the second day Magnus deserted and left the peat-banks to climb farther up the hill. In a high lonely place he sat down and looked at the country spread beneath him, the chequered fields, the lochs, the low moors to the west that here and there were broken into by the sea, and beaches made by the waves' invasion. In three places the sea was visible, bright blue, but the rest was moorland and tillage, and every year the ploughed fields were marching farther into the moors and the island grew more green. It was a land cultivated and kindly and secure, a little land in the midst of the sea, treasuring its comfort because of the storms that were its familiar neighbours, prizing its small prosperity because three thousand waste Atlantic miles broke on its threshold. Its contours were graceful and strong, swept smooth by the wind, unbroken by trees. Cattle, tiny at that distance, moved slowly in the fields.

Magnus thought: Here is my home and here is where I shall live. We're virtually independent here and a man can live on the products of his own labour. When that is possible there's no need to think of politics, and it will be a relief not to think of them, for the more I consider political theories the less I can believe in them and the less I can wholly dismiss them. If I had lived in 1890 I would have been an Imperialist, and if I were living in London today, and were unemployed, I would call myself a Communist. But between those blissfully positive poles there's a world of twilit muddle and quarter-truths, and I'm damned if I can find a label to suit me, or any other reasonable man. How pleasant would be a democracy were demagogues forbidden to cross its frontiers; how excellent an autocracy with a philosopher for king! And peace would be infinitely desirable if all the world were wise and witty; but to go to war with Napoleon or Hannibal or Montrose must have been a splendid adventure. I would like to believe whole-heartedly in something, but such belief is impossible in this disgusting ant-hill of a modern world, where nothing is clean-cut, nothing simple and whole. I
would believe in God—sometimes I nearly do—if it were not for the abominable suggestion that He made man in His own image: if God is like an out-of-work miner from South Wales, or a fox-hunting stockbroker, or Smellie, or even me, then thank the sceptics for atheism. Perhaps man was God's Frankenstein and destroyed Him with the stink of the cities of the plain. Lord, what a stench goes up from the chimneys! And the cities are drugging themselves with the bedside comforts of their civilization so as to be unaware of their death when it comes. But I shall escape that destruction—perhaps, like Lot, I shall beget a new race on my daughters if they can make me drunk enough to forget my manners—and when all the nations have laid themselves waste, like clockwork cats from a mechanized Kilkenny, humanity will still survive in the quiet islands of the sea, in Orkney, in the Outer Hebrides, in the Paumotus and Fiji and the granite islands of the Aegean. And we shall trade with each other, bartering dried fish for olives, and exploring together the ruins of London and the broken walls of Berlin.

His speculations having reached this visionary stage, Magnus lay back on the heather and fell asleep. He dreamed of marrying Rose and fathering on her a huge family who worked three hundred acres of good land for him, while he sat at the table-top, a patriarch, and thundered his commands to sons and serving-maids and dogs and children. A curlew, crying loudly, woke him, and he yawned awhile, and then lay down again. Now he dreamed that the heather was growing into his armpits and overgrowing his legs, that the moss was yielding and the hillside making him its own, one soil with its soil, till the wild bees found honey in his hair and whaups made a nest in his navel.

The sun was far down the sky and a cold wind blew when he woke again. He stretched himself slowly and scratched his armpits, that felt itchy when he remembered his second dream. It was either a death-wish, he thought, or else he had visualized the earth as Demeter and was re-entering the womb. And as he walked home he composed a bawdy poem about psycho-analysis.

No sooner were the peats brought in than it was time to prepare for an event of social importance, the West Mainland
Cattle Show. For this congregation of animals, competing in beauty for the pride of their masters, Willy selected a calving cow, three stirks, the bay mare and the sorrel foal, the black gelding, and the promising two-year-old horse. On the eve of the show Magnus and the ploughman washed the horses' legs, scraped and combed them, and scrubbed and oiled the black hides of the cattle. Willy, leaning on his stick, stood wisely watching them, and debated what price he could ask for the stirk and the gelding should buyers present themselves.

On the following morning the household was early astir, the cattle were washed again, and the horses were groomed again, and coloured straw was woven into their manes and tails. The animals had the bright aspect of holidays about them when they set out for Dounby, but Magnus, who was leading the black gelding and the two-year-old, wore a serious look. His enthusiastic interest in farming matters gave the occasion a somewhat exaggerated importance, and he was deeply concerned lest the dusty roads should mar the gelding's toilet.

Similar small processions of men and their animals were converging from all directions on the village of Dounby, where the show-ground lay. The wealth of the country was on the roads: tall Clydesdale horses, satin-skinned, feathered of fetlock, trod in their pride; fat sheep, their wool tight-curled and clean, were foolish and eager to go any way but the right one; and heavy cattle followed with an air of resentment that their dignity, so notable in repose, should be lost in movement. There were men who led a lonely cow, and others who drove a small herd. Here were half a dozen horses together, and there a shy yearling filly, the single entry from a little hillside farm. The beasts in the fields, the commoner kinds fit only for work and beef, came to the roadside fences to see their more handsome cousins pass. And in every house the morning's work was quickly done, so that all who could might come to the show: but the goodwife or a servant-girl must stay at home to feed the hens and boil a pot for the calves.

By eleven o'clock the show-yard was full. The young horses stood in a long row on one side; the mares and
their frightened wild foals were in stalls farther on; the stirks, the cows in milk and the cows in calf, standing quieter than the horses, were closely ranked; a few bulls regarded the world with insolent and sleepy eyes; and among the silly sheep, packed closely in their pens, was insolence as lordly as the bulls' where the Leicester tups with their great Roman noses sniffed the rich air. The owners of this wealth had no such conceit of bearing as they walked about and met their friends and exchanged their news: they were good honest men who worked too hard to show a front of pride, and all their swaggering was in their beasts. They stood round the judges' ring like little shabby sculptors who carve giant limbs that mock their own, and watched impassively the massive beauty they had bred compete for pride of place.