Magnus Merriman (35 page)

Jupiter
couchant
was more impressive than ever. His bulk seemed to overflow the surrounding floor, and his shoulders rose from the straw like a flank of the Himalayas. Mr Carron began to recite his pedigree as though it were an obituary notice. Pessimism and whisky infused his voice as he spoke of Jason of Ballindalloch, Belle of Candacraig, Victor of Ballindalloch, Electra, Mosstrooper, Black Begonia, Montargis, Pride of Mulben, and other cows of price and bulls of great privilege and pride. The black-polled aristocracy of Scotland were Jupiter's ancestors, and Jupiter was their proper scion.

‘How much would you sell him for?' said Magnus suddenly.

‘Two hundred and fifty guineas,' said Mr Carron.

‘That's a lot of money.'

‘I couldn't take a penny less.'

‘I'll give you two hundred guineas,' said Magnus, and his voice cracked as he said it.

Mr Carron was surprised. ‘I didn't know you were a breeder,' he said.

‘I'm not.'

‘Then why…?'

‘I mean to become one.'

‘What sort of herd have you?'

‘It's a very small one.'

‘Well, two hundred and fifty guineas is my price,' said Mr Carron.

‘I can't afford more than two hundred. Will you take that?'

Mr Carron fingered his chin and emitted a little belch. ‘Yes,' he said and led Magnus back to the house.

Two days later Magnus returned to Orkney and took Jupiter with him. He had wired to Meiklejohn saying that circumstances prevented him fulfilling his engagement at the Wallace celebrations, and having established
bona fides
he had given Mr Carron a cheque for two hundred and ten pounds. Mr Carron had celebrated the sale in lavish style and Magnus was but imperfectly sober until the winds of the Pentland Firth expelled the last fumes of Caithness whisky. But sobriety did not impair his satisfaction in possessing a champion bull. His excitement, when he looked at Jupiter, was now of a more delicate kind than the robust confidence that had sailed on whisky, but he would not have resold the bull though Carron had offered three hundred guineas for it. He was inexpressibly proud and glad with a kind of tremulous joy. He could still hardly believe that he owned this marvellous animal.

In Orkney Jupiter created a major sensation. Such a bull had never been in the island before. From far and wide people came to Mossetter to see him, and applications for his services were immediate. On his father-in-law's advice, however, Magnus considered these requests very carefully and agreed to admit to this desirable union only such cows as were eminently worthy of it. His own best animal, the cow that came from the Bu, being happily in season, was Jupiter's first mate.

Even Rose admitted the bull's superlative qualities and was proud that her husband should own him though she had been profoundly shocked by his recklessness in buying him.

‘How much did you pay for him?' she asked.

‘A hundred pounds,' said Magnus.

Rose was appalled and Magnus congratulated himself on forgetting to fill in the counterfoil of the cheque he had given Carron.

‘A hundred pounds!' she repeated. ‘Best forgive you, that's more than my father ever paid for two beasts, and there's not many in Orkney buys as dear as he does.'

But the longer she looked at Jupiter the feebler grew her criticism, for his beauty disarmed her. He was gentle, moreover, and peaceful despite his strength. His nature was
mild as his loins were mighty. Rose and Magnus both spent a lot of time talking to him and making much of him, and work was neglected on his account. Still his visitors came inquisitive and went home envious, and still, when they had gone, Magnus returned to his shed and contemplated him with unabating joy.

For three weeks Jupiter was the pride of the house and bestrode his cows with potent dignity. Then came the tragedy. He slipped and fell, and rose again slowly. They took him to his shed and, scarcely daring to suggest it, hoped that he was not hurt. But in the morning he seemed uncomfortable and Magnus called in the veterinary surgeon, who was uncertain as to what had happened, but optimistically applied a blister. Jupiter did not improve and the vet declared he must have injured one of his vertebrae. Jupiter found more and more difficulty in getting to his legs, for his weight was vast and hung grievously on his damaged spine.

The day came when he could not rise at all, but lay in mournful bewilderment on the straw. Now and again he would struggle and thrust out a forefoot. The huge muscles under his smooth black hide would tremble, and gather their strength, and the foreleg, absurdly small for so great a body, would stiffen beneath the weight put on it. But always the effort was too much. There would be a groan, a dull moaning sound that seemed to come from the depths of his being, and Jupiter would fall back helpless. Sometimes he would raise his head and piteously low. But his head sank lower and the strength of his head acquired an infinite sadness. Between the frontal ridges, thick and jutting, on his massive forehead there was a depression over which the skin was corrugated, and those deep wrinkles appeared to grow more deep. Save when he struggled to get up his brown eyes were patient, but late in the afternoon huge tears ran from them and his head went from side to side in a vain questing for help. Seeing this, Rose wept openly, and Magnus hardly restrained his grief.

They sat with the dying bull all night, and in the morning Magnus went to Bu and asked Peter to come and shoot him.

Harvest came and Magnus sold a few animals for little more than the price he had paid for them. His corn was only moderately good and the pessimism he had felt after Jupiter's death recurred and darkened the coming of winter. Neither he nor Rose had readily recovered from the loss of the bull. He had admitted that the purchase of such an animal was senseless—extravagance—and Rose, in her occasional fits of temper, did not hesitate to accuse him of senseless extravagance—but it was not the loss of two hundred guineas that chiefly afflicted him. Jupiter had represented his loftiest ambitions in farming, and by his gentleness and semblance of benignity he had excited not only pride but, despite the incongruity of such emotion, love. The memory of his death pains was a permanent memory, and his grooved and puzzled forehead, his piteous eyes, were a picture not to be erased from the mind.

In his autumnal unhappiness Magnus did what he seldom had the inclination to do and studied his finances. He found to his dismay that he had spent over £1,250 since the previous December, and made nothing but a boy's pocket-money.
The Great Beasts Walk Alone
was still selling slowly, but his receipts from it would rapidly diminish now, and of
The Returning Sun
a bare five hundred copies had been sold. He had a thousand pounds in War Loan stock, but clearly he must begin to make money out of the farm or that modest capital would quickly vanish. In reaction against the expensive purchase of Jupiter he bought a foal for eight pounds and a shabby-looking cow in calf for ten. And in the comparative idleness of winter he began to think once more of writing.

He had no clear conception of the new book he contemplated, but vaguely he desired to write about Orkney. He filled a note-book with scraps of local description. He remembered the colour and figuration of the sky on a summer morning or at the setting of the sun, and described with care and selection the flocculence of little clouds, the grass-green peninsulas that escaped the fiery splendour of the sun's descent, and the quiet pallor of the
unripened moon. He recalled the minute but lavish wealth of meadows in June, and discussed the flight of mating lapwings, the coming of the terns, the buccaneering of hen-harriers and black-backed gulls. He took notes of Mary Isbister's conversation, of Peter's, and of the stories that Johnny Peace the shoemaker and Jock of the Brecks had told him. He read the Orkenyinga Saga. And out of all this he hoped, some day and somehow, to make a story. But the intention, form, and style of the story as yet eluded him.

He re-read familiar books with increasing pleasure. He had a library that to Rose seemed wantonly enormous and was indeed big enough for a whole community of farmers. He had gathered it in various places and at various times. Tod's
Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan
and some volumes on Mogul painting recalled his residence in India, and first editions of Ernest Hemingway came from America. His taste was catholic: Jane Austen, Tchehov, and Rabelais stood shoulder to shoulder on his shelves, and
Don Quixote
was neighbourly with Doughty and
Extra
ordinary Women
and
Revolt in the Desert. The Thousand
and One Nights
, in four green volumes, jostled Bradley's
Shakespearean Tragedy
, and several copies of
Transition were
curiously placed between Webster and Wodehouse. His bookshelves occupied an unfair proportion of the ben-room, and from the bedroom, that opened off it, Magnus could see the sober variegation of their rows and delight in the proximity of so much wisdom and wit, life caught in the act, and poetry, and prejudice, and incongruity. How charming to have the Icelandic sagas next door to
Conversations in Ebury Street
, and Froissart leaning friendly on
Mrs Dalloway
!

And he had discovered all his old school-books at Midhouse, and having taken them home he perceived a strange desire to re-educate himself. At one time, apparently, he had been able to read Greek texts of such varying difficulty as the
Anabasis
and
Prometheus Bound
. He examined them and found that even Xenophon presented difficulties nowadays. This was regrettable, he thought, and he recalled a poem he had opportunely remembered
once before, that was called
The Princess of Scotland
and contained the lines:

In pursuit of this visionary state he decided to relearn the language of Plato and Euripides, and began to study a battered red-covered grammar-book called
Greek Rudiments
.

The habit of much reading persisted even after the turn of the year, and grew untimely when the days lightened and work became more urgent. Rose was often ill-tongued when he sat indoors with a book on his knees, but having grown more familiar with the routine of farming Magnus discovered that Johnny could do much of it, especially in wet weather, without his help, and continued his studies. In the spring he was greatly cheered by selling for no less than nineteen pounds the foal he had bought for eight. And the ten-pound cow had given birth to a surprisingly handsome calf.

In June Rose followed suit and bore him another son, who was christened Magnus and known as Peerie Mansie. He seemed healthy enough, but he was a noisier child than Peter had been. Peter was now a boy that any parents might be proud of. He was big and strong, he was already trying to walk, and according to Rose already successfully experimenting with speech. Magnus began to transfer his own ambitions to Peter, and found in the child's high forehead a clear indication of intellectual strength.

The mobility on which Magnus had for long depended for enjoyment and vital interest was now completely lost, and he was settled fast in Orkney. His guerrilla days were over and he did not regret their passing, for he had little time to remember them. He had been used to think that if a man's life was static then time around him was correspondingly slow; but now he discovered the hours slid by with the easy movement of a rich man's car. Time no longer rattled past, but like a Rolls-Royce purred sweetly and devoured day after day, swiftly and with no sound of haste. April led to summer, and harvest came, and winter followed. The year—his second as a farmer—was full of interest and devoid of excitement.

He grew somewhat stouter and his clothes were shabbier. His face reddened and he became indifferent to cold winds and muddy roads. He learned a little more about farming and studied with pleasure the Greek texts he had scamped and yawned over and detested at school. He was friendly with all his neighbours and, whenever he remembered, he continued to record in his note-books the racier fragments of their conversation beside his descriptions of the plover's black bib and the shaking of reeds in the wind. His second harvest was much better than his first, and the bull-calf which the black cow had borne to Jupiter was a dainty model of his great father. He bought Rose a gold bracelet to mark the second anniversary of their wedding, and she rated him soundly for his foolishness.

Magnus had now lived for a long time in soberness and respectability, for not since buying Jupiter had he been really drunk. And now, though the season of joy and drinking was upon them, he behaved with the decorum befitting an honest farmer and the father of a family. Christmas passed and New Year came, when there was meat and ale in every house and every traveller after the fall of darkness had a bottle in his pocket. Yet Magnus conducted himself with virtue, and whenever he was offered whisky in a friendly house took a little cheese with it to mollify its effects, and from his own bottle drank only the merest sip for courtesy's sake. When he went visiting with Rose he did not forsake her and join company with the wild young men who passed round their little flat bottles in the stable, but sat with her and the other married people and contributed his proper share of the gossip. Christmas passed and New Year followed it: Magnus's virtue remained unspotted, Rose's temper woke only to trivial expression even though she found him studying
Greek Rudiments
when he should have been suppering the horses: and they lived together in happiness and content.

But late in January he fell from grace.

A winter storm broke on the islands and wrought destruction beneath its wings. In the cold light of day it began with a mutter of wind from the north-west, and the wind grew towards night, and in the darkness it came to its
strength and roared madly under a maddened sky. The sea in never-ending waves broke on the cliffs and poured its salt cascades on their bald and sodden shoulders. Out of the Atlantic desert came the black battalions of the waves, rearing in the darkness their ruffled hides, shaking their tattered manes, falling in ceaseless fury on the stubborn shore. They broke a trawler and drowned her crew by the Kame of Hoy: they drove another, borne like Mazeppa on a giant horse, hard ashore in a Westray geo. They shook their saltness over the unseen fields, and the noise of their attack—trundling huge boulders up a narrow beach, thundering on the rocks—sounded like gunfire through the yelling chorus of the winds. In the landward parishes chimneys were blown down, ricks fell flat and strawed their broken sheaves about the fields, and wooden sheds were toppled over with wanton buffets. Women lay sleepless in their beds and wondered if their roof would, on a sudden, crack asunder and leap apart and leave them naked under the howling sky. Men, hastily booted and dressed, thrust open resisting doors, and staggered to and fro in the darkness and the wind to make fast all that was loosely founded or frailly built. And shrieking round a gable the wind would fill their throats as though to drown them.

At last, like a black and ragged plaster, the night was torn from the sky and left a grey distress behind it. Now could be seen the ruins of the gale: here were ricks fallen sideways and there, as though clawed by gigantic tigers, were others with their round tops torn off; here a wooden henhouse lay upside down beside a dyke, and where the hens were no one knew; and there, capering across the fields, a large tarpaulin flounced and faltered, and filled its belly with wind, and sailed awhile, and shook a flapping corner, and finally wrapped itself round a telegraph post and flew there like a monstrous grey banner.

Magnus spent most of the night outdoors. At first the wind had daunted him, then it had angered him, and at last it had filled him with joy. As he worked to make fast all that could be made fast he fought with the wind and beat it, and having beaten it he derided it, and like a twopenny Lear shouted his mockery against it.

‘Blow, wind!' he cried. ‘Smack with a bold robustious hand the broad backside of the buffoon world! Puff and blow, boy! Rip the blankets off the bed and smack the bare dowps you find, you bellowing fool, you winter spasm, you burst balloon!'

By shouting such nonsense as this he added to his enjoyment of the storm, and went indoors with a very restless feeling, a feeling of superfluous energy, and a desire to spend it recklessly on any activity that offered. He made love to Rose, who had been frightened by the wind, and got up again, and rebuilt the fire, and set the table for breakfast.

Presently Rose went to the door and very cautiously opened it. But no sooner was it half-open than the wind tore it from her grasp and flung it wide. The household cat had followed her, and, foolishly inquisitive, crept over the doorstep. Immediately the wind bowled it over. Picking itself up the cat turned tail and ran, and once running could not stop.

‘My cat, my cat!' cried Rose. ‘She's blown away, Mansie!'

Magnus followed, and past the corner of the house saw the cat turned tail over head, and find its feet again, and leap like a toy kangaroo, all its fur brushed the wrong way, and powerless to halt or turn. It was a big yellow cat and the wind used it like a yellow football. He followed it to the road. It was blown through a barbed-wire fence and somehow succeeded in steering itself between the barbs. Then it fell into a ditch on the other side of the road, and lay there secure. Magnus carried it back to the house, struggling against the wind, and Rose fondled it as though nothing she owned were more precious to her.

The boy Peter wanted to know what had happened, and Magnus, all out of breath but pleased by the second chance to try his strength against the storm, took him on his knee and began to tell a fantastic story of a ginger cat that was blown all round the world, and a giant followed it, and the giant trod cities out of sight as he ran, and tripped over St Paul's, and fell in the Channel with such a splash that three steamers sank, and got up again and ran through France and Spain. But a mouse came out of the Prado and the wind changed and the cat followed the mouse, that was going to
help an African lion but was unsure of the way to Africa, so they ran eastwards along the Mediterranean and crossed the Greek islands like stepping-stones, and came to the desert, and at last after running for a long time—and the wind was changeable—they reached the Equator. And there the ginger cat took a great leap into the sky and became a comet with a ginger tail. But the giant stayed where he was and undid the Equator and used it for a skipping-rope and lived happily ever after.

Peter understood practically nothing of this story, but Magnus thought it an excellent tale and wished he had made the journey more complicated so that it might have lasted longer. He found the routine of farm-life very dull that morning, and impatiently desired that something would happen to engage his attention in a livelier way.

By eleven o'clock the storm had passed, leaving a dead calm behind, and the country, windless and almost breathless it seemed, lay under the still sky with an odd look of dishevelment. It was a cold stillness. The sky was white and cold, and in the afternoon the air held a chill suspense.

Magnus was uneasy and excitable all day, and at tea-time he said he was going to the village with a pair of shoes that needed mending. Rose, who had observed his restlessness, appeared suspicious, but Magnus had found a pair of boots so badly worn that a visit to the cobbler seemed reasonable indeed. He mounted his bicycle and rode away. But when he came to the main road he turned, not towards the village, but to Kirkwall. Having ridden the fifteen miles thither he bought a bottle of whisky and rode back again and took his boots to the cobbler.