Magnus Merriman (31 page)

‘Has Lady Mercy had another intuition?'

‘Yes, and it's a good one, as usual,' said Nelly faithfully.

In Manchester Street she said good-by to them, and the taxi continued its roundabout route to Tavistock Square. Margaret, as had been her custom before, had left her car there. Magnus did not ask her to come in.

She stood for a moment on the pavement. Then she said,
‘I do understand how a girl like Frieda can attract a man, but honestly she wouldn't be good for you. She knows too much, and she's dangerous.'

‘Frieda?' said Magnus. ‘She means nothing to me, Meg.'

He opened the door of her car and said good-night.

The darkness of his mood intensified when he sat alone in his flat, for he could not absolve himself of responsibility for the change in Frieda's circumstances and he could not believe that she was happy to be living with French. He supposed that she had left the Wishart's house after a quarrel of which he might well have been the cause: or perhaps she had grown reckless, flouted their authority, and abandoned their smug dwelling in a flare of impatience. But even so he was partly responsible, for he had refused to marry her and so by frustration increased her recklessness. It was true, he reflected with meagre consolation, that none but a saint could be expected to marry a girl to save her from ruin: but then a saint would not have made Frieda his mistress to begin with. And every moralist averred that such indulgence was a new milestone on the road to ruin. The road to ruin! A good melodramatic phrase, long out of fashion, but still truth-telling and significant. The whore's progress, he thought. Her feet go down to death, her steps take hold on hell. And he thought of Frieda's beauty, her courage, her gaiety, her love, that he had thrown away, and now, it seemed, they were to be wasted in common harlotry.

He fell into a passion of despair and cursed alike his self-indulgence, his cowardice, his instability, and his luck. The Pelion piled itself on Ossa and both toppled over, for he remembered there was Margaret too: she had been his mistress, and he had grown tired of her also. His conscience could bear and be miserable under the burden of one cast lover, but to have two hanging on it was more than it could support. His conscience collapsed and wearily, as if from a distance, he contemplated himself and Frieda and Margaret and saw them as tiresome and unnecessary puppets absurdly posturing on an overcrowded stage. The world was full of tiresome and unnecessary people. The image of himself, however, seemed more important than
the others: he disliked it more. He wondered if he bore seeds of destruction with him, the germs of failure, like a moral typhoid-carrier. If that is so, he thought, I ought to commit suicide. That is the only logical and honest thing to do.

He got up to look for a drink. The siphon was empty and he went to the pantry for another. The passage was dark and the door stood ajar. He hit his forehead hard against the edge of it, and flew into a rage.

‘Good God damn and blast the bloody fool who made that door to everlasting hell, the lousy bastard!' he shouted, and kicked the dumb wood with all his strength. He took a siphon and went back to his sitting-room. He used the siphon so injudiciously that half the whisky he had poured was splashed out of the glass. He drank what was left, and in his anger forgot that he had been meditating suicide.

Slowly his ill-temper vanished, and now he felt less sympathetic with the victims of his romantic ardour. He had not been the first to sleep with Frieda, and if she had not fallen in love with him she would have fallen in love with somebody else. She had confessed that celibacy didn't suit her. She was hardy and restless and inflammable, and he wasn't responsible for her character. He remembered that Nelly Bly had said that every animal must walk in its own way. That smelt of determinism, and determinism was a detestable heresy, but there might be a grain of truth in it. Perhaps, like a deer park, free-will was circumscribed by the tall fence of one's character, temperament, and individual nature. Perhaps every human being was a kind of specific magnet, drawing to himself only incidents and fortune of a particular kind. Perhaps, thought Magnus, nothing happens to a man except that which is intrinsically like him.

This thesis occupied his attention for a long time. He succeeded in persuading himself that it was neither determinism nor behaviourism, for he hated any infringement of personal liberty or diminution of the soul. He reconciled it, however, with the admirable spirit of Norse fatalism, that was active, not passive, and full of energy and ego even in the very face of doom. He discovered an analogy in the universe and saw man as a miniature earth attended by his specific planets,
yet travelling freely in space. The more he thought of it the more he was convinced that his thesis was true.

‘Nothing happens to a man except that which is intrinsically like him,' he repeated.

It accounted for Frieda's rakish progress, and if, as he had often thought, there was something indomitably clownish in his own character, it accounted for his frequent misfortunes. And what did it predict for his future? Magnus spent a wakeful night in this vain speculation.

Two days later Barney Wardle invited Magnus to lunch with him in the Savoy Hotel. The magnificent environment of Mr Wardle's entertainment impressed Magnus less as he grew more familiar with it; and while he listened to Mr Wardle's gossip about their neighbours, and observed Mr Wardle's familiar acquaintanceship with half the occupants of the room, and even overheard tattling fragments of talk from the nearby tables, it occurred to him that all this was remarkably like Orkney. Here as there one's social horizon was comparatively narrow. Mr Wardle's acquaintances, despite their wealth or notoriety, lived a life as circumscribed in its interests as that of an Orkney farmer, and though they spoke in a different accent they spoke of comparable topics: the profits of a new play and the profits of a harvest; the peculiarities of a marquis and the idiosyncrasies of the village post-mistress; the conviction of a financier and the capture of a ploughman riding his bicycle without a lamp on it—there was no great difference between such things as these. The smart, fashionable, and notorious people in London made for themselves a village society, as did the literary people in Hampstead, the more specifically or assertively intellectual people in Bloomsbury, the theatrical people wherever two or three of them were gathered together, the suburbanites in the brick-and-acacia amenities of their own garden city, the soldiers in their clubs in Piccadilly, the costers here, the Civil Servants there, the dockers by the river, and the wives of £300 a year clerks in that station whither God had pleased to call them. Probably, thought Magnus, the human mind is essentially a village mind, unfitted and unwilling for
a wider life, and so, whatever its circumstances, it constructs for itself an horizon between the duck-pond and the Squire's ancestral walls.

Mr Wardle's voice broke in upon his thoughts, and he was startled to hear him saying, ‘So Lady Mercy has decided to give absolute support to McMaster's government. With the revelation of his new attitude towards tariffs, and after the firmness he has shown to both the Liberals and his former Socialist colleagues, she is convinced that he is the right man to lead the country. And I myself feel that with our support he will be able to do a great deal of good. Now you have attracted a lot of attention by your denunciation of McMaster and your witty and sarcastic comments on his policy, and we feel that we could make a very telling gesture by publishing your new and revised opinion of the National Cartel.'

‘But I haven't any new opinion of it,' said Magnus. ‘I never did like it, and I don't like it now.'

‘Nonsense,' said Barney Wardle. ‘I tell you that Lady Mercy is putting forward a new policy, and so we have all formed a new opinion of McMaster. Now what I want you to do is this: you'll write an article entitled “I am a Convert”, and you'll describe your conversion to the policy of the National Cartel in a mood of glowing enthusiasm. No sarcasm or irony, remember! Write simply but fervently. Say that you have seen the light, that you realize McMaster is the only man who can save Britain from bankruptcy and ruin, and that you bitterly regret your previous strictures on him. Don't be afraid of a pious note. After all, the welfare of the nation is a sacred charge. So let yourself go—quote the Bible or Shakespeare if you like—and give us something red-hot. “I am a Convert”. It will do a lot of good if you bring it off properly. About twelve hundred words: let me have the article tomorrow, will you? And now I must get back to the office.'

Before Magnus could collect his thoughts Mr Wardle had paid the bill, given friendly greetings to a couple of friends, advised another to buy dollar securities, and was gone.

Magnus walked home. He lingered awhile in Charing Cross Road and bought the Loeb translation of Lucretius'
De Rerum Natura
. He crossed Oxford Street and continued slowly up Tottenham Court Road. He felt that the successive displays of second-hand books and cheap new furniture were vaguely symbolic of something or other, but he had not the patience to consider what. Indignation against Mr Wardle and his proposals, that grew stronger as he walked, was obscuring all other thoughts. At first he had been too surprised to feel any definite emotion. Then a small and fleeting temptation had assailed him to accept the offer and vindicate the theatrical cynicism he had packed with his suits and shirts for the journey to London. But he soon discovered that this was impossible. He was not a conjuror to swallow his words and regurge their antonyms. He was not a circus-clown to turn somersaults whenever the ringmaster cracked his whip. He was not in truth a journalist, who might save his conscience by serving his paper: he was—he suddenly remembered it—a poet. ‘A poet, by God,' he said loudly on the west pavement of Tottenham Court Road. And a poet, he thought fiercely, is not to be bought: he is neither merchandise nor a whore, but master of his own kingdom or an outlaw in another's.

Now he walked rapidly, head high and frowning, As soon as he reached his flat he sat down and wrote to Mr Wardle briefly but forcibly, and resigned his temporary position on the
Morning Call
. He felt better for this exercise and re-read his letter with great satisfaction.

He found waiting for him the proof-sheets of
The Return
ing Sun
, and, since he was now under no compulsion to remain in London, he decided to go to the country for a few days and revise them carefully and at leisure. He recalled a brief holiday spent some years before in a farm-boarding house in the Mendips, and wired to engage a room. He left town on the following morning and stayed a week in Somerset. He revised his proofs with meticulous care, read Lucretius, and took solitary pleasure in walking over the winter-pale hills in an air too mild for winter.

He returned to London without any definite plans for the future, and found his future had already been dictated. Among the letters that had arrived during his absence there
was one addressed in a neat, unformed, school-room hand. He opened it and read:

His first feeling was panic. He had long ago persuaded himself that his moonlight escapade had been inconsequential as moonlight, and to learn that it was shortly to have very lively consequences was an overwhelming shock. But after the initial dismay he had no doubt as to what he must do. He suddenly felt a tremendous necessity for hurry and wished most ardently that he could marry Rose within the next half hour. It was not that he wanted to be married. He contemplated his approaching state with dull foreboding. But he thought of Frieda and of Margaret, and that Rose should be added to them, and they should hang round the neck of his conscience a triple burden, was more than he could stand. And Rose was infinitely more defenceless than they, Rose had been innocent, and Rose with a child in her womb had no chance to forget him and find consolation in other love. Remorse and pity clamoured in his mind, and pity goaded him to make instant reparation. He left his other letters unopened and began to pack his clothes with feverish haste.

Then he looked at Rose's letter again, and discovered from the postmark that it must have been lying in his flat for nearly a week. Here was new cause for unhappiness. He pictured her watching every day for the postman, watching for his own arrival, and slowly, despairingly coming to the conclusion that he meant to desert her, to leave her to her shame. He tortured himself with vain imagining of her fears and misery.

He could send a telegram to say that he was coming
immediately, but that would tell her family, tell the whole parish even, the plain unvarnished story of their love. Should Rose receive a telegram saying that he was returning at once, everyone would at once know why. There could be only one reason. Even a letter would provoke inquiry, and a telegram was open for the world to read. It was impossible to reassure her by anything but his own return, and to put a stop to her fears he must go without delay. It was too late to travel that night, but he would take the morning train to Glasgow.

He made such arrangements as were necessary, and once again left his flat in charge of the caretaker. But this time, he said, he would not be coming back.

In the train he re-read Rose's letter. Compared with his own mood it was calm and serene. She seemed in no way to doubt the honesty of his intentions, and to think of such confidence, of her trusting innocency, redoubled Magnus's desire to maintain the former nor disabuse the latter. How touching was her belief! He grew more tender towards her with every mile, compassion became twin-sister to love, and he vowed he would repay her faith with loving kindness.

The long journey made him restless and weary with continued excitement. He slept a little between Glasgow and Inverness, but no more than an hour or two. Through the sombre magnificence of Sutherland and the great heather-deserts of Caithness the train ran slowly northwards. The Pentland Firth lay cold and dull-hued as lead. The little mail-steamer picked her way between the tides and the roosts, and came into the calmness of Scapa Flow. The early darkness of a winter evening was falling when he went ashore.