Magnus Merriman (4 page)

Margaret left the flat about one o'clock, indignant and lately recovered from tears. She had concluded another embrace with the remark: ‘Wasn't it clever of Nigel to ask if we were going to get married? Children have curious intuitions, don't you think?'

Magnus, with a cold and sudden volubility, answered: ‘I've discovered the truth about you at last, Meg. You're simply a squaw. No, don't interrupt me: I haven't nearly finished. You've got a lovely caressing voice, a very good figure, a handsome chin, the most delicate and alluring of nostrils, a complexion almost as good as it used to be, really beautiful ears, and well-brushed hair: but under all that there's a squat, square-faced, beady-eyed squaw with a baby at her breast and her bottom on the earth, and nothing in her heart but perpetual hunger and the will to survive. You're the eternal squaw, and since I've realized that I've become genuinely fond of you, though not in a romantic way, I'm afraid. But for God's sake don't say another word about your confounded children: I heartily disliked them when I saw them, and I'm tired to death by your stories of them.'

With righteous vexation and a tinge of fear—for she had never heard Magnus speak in this manner—Margaret scrambled out of bed, and catching her foot in the blanket fell heavily on her knees. She burst into tears.

‘I don't know what you mean,' she cried. ‘I let you make love to me—I didn't specially want you to, but you talked
such a lot about it, and said you had loved me for ten years or something, and now you tell me I'm a squaw! And you've no right to talk like that about Nigel and Rosemary. They're darlings and I love them more than anything on earth, and I don't care a damn what you think of them. And I've hurt my knee, and I'm not a squaw—go away, I hate you!'

Magnus made vain gestures of comfort and reconciliation. He had yielded to impulse in uttering his thoughts aloud, and when he saw Margaret struggling to control her sobs and thrusting her hair, usually so tidy and now all unruly, away from her face that was flushed and miserable, he was filled with remorse.

He said unhappily: ‘Meg, I didn't mean it in the way you think I meant it. I talk a lot, you know, and words simply come out and make astonishing suggestions before I know what they're doing. I didn't mean to hurt you. I think Nigel's a splendid youngster, and Rosemary is a dear.'

‘You're sitting on my stockings,' she cried, and pushed him away.

‘Come back to bed and I'll explain exactly what I meant.'

Margaret, dressing speedily and imprecisely, said viciously: ‘If I had talked about your books instead of my children you wouldn't have grown tired to death of listening to me. But it happens that I've never read your damned novel, though I said I had, because the first chapter was so stupid and pretentious that I couldn't go on with it.'

The circumstances in which this judgment was delivered prevented Magnus from taking it too seriously—a critic struggling to bridge the gap between her stocking-top and knickers with a revulsive suspender cannot be held to be speaking
ex cathedra
—but it aggravated his depression, and he grew still more contrite to think that Margaret had, to some extent, spoken the truth. She was correct in believing that discussion of
The Great Beasts Walk Alone
would have bored him less than anecdotes about her children. He had often known a desire to hear her talk about it, and he had several times, by leading questions and more subtle means, tried to elicit her detailed opinion of it. But she had always hidden her views in misty generalities, or offered some strong superlative when he asked for the bread of nice
perception. It was probably true that she had never read the book. It made him genuinely unhappy to realize this, but he had not the heart to upbraid her for such unkind neglect when he himself had lately been much less than kind. He made instead another move to console her and restore good-will, but again she repulsed him, and declared her intention of immediately going home.

‘Then let me get you a taxi,' he said.

Margaret tilted a mirror, knocked down a pair of brushes, and pouted her mouth for lipstick. ‘You can't go out like that,' she said.

In a gloomy silence Magnus began to dress himself. When he had reached the point of knotting his tie Margaret said coldly: ‘You needn't bother. My car's just outside in the square—I drove it here and took a taxi to the restaurant.'

All trace of emotion gone she walked firmly downstairs, and disdaining his help opened the door and left without more words than a decided ‘Never!' in reply to his ill-judged query: ‘When shall I see you again?'

Magnus returned to his flat and sat down to consider, with the help of a whisky and soda, the events of the evening. His criticism of Margaret's character now seemed mere ill-natured abuse. He recalled his words and they combined with a picture of their catastrophic sequel to stand, in vivid opposition, against all his memories of her in her lovely youth. He groaned and damned his soul for such cruelty and misfortune. Then he remembered telling her at dinner that he had borne his love for her, intact and bright, from Persia to the Pacific, and was woefully ashamed of such bombast and mendacity. ‘I'm a fool and a liar,' he said aloud and stood up to look at himself in a glass that hung on the wall.

His eyes, a greyish-blue beneath dark brows uplifted at the outer corners, stared back at him with mournful intensity. Under the disorder of his hair, and in the brightness of reflected light, his face was pale and his expression a settled melancholy. In solitude he generally wore this appearance, and as he found considerable pleasure—exercising curiosity rather than vanity—in looking into mirrors, he believed it to be his true aspect. But in conversation the restless force of his
imagination and the vigorous interest that argument roused in him gave his features animation so lively that their very shape appeared to change when scorn gave place to warm agreement, when indignation followed laughter. He looked like a satyr when the topic was bawdy, like a rustic at a fair when he more loudly laughed, and often he had an air of solid worth and even benignity that was somewhat misleading.

‘God forgive me, I'm a liar,' he repeated, and took his whisky from a table and watched himself drink it. ‘A liar and a lover gone bad, and drink is one of the elements in which I live.'

His self-distaste became somewhat more remote, and he came gradually to contemplate his unhappiness, if not with satisfaction, at least with resignation. He saw himself as the tragic wooer, the prey of hope ever resurgent and a hostile universe. But tragedy had run its course and the life in him was still undefeated. He decided, quite definitely, that he was out of love with Margaret as well as himself, and he resolved anew to leave London, partly for the reasons he had already stated and partly because it was associated with his present misfortune, and to seek recreation in his native Orkney.

He thought of the Islands with sudden affection. For several years he had not troubled to revisit them, but he had often remembered them and not seldom spoken of them with enthusiasm that, to his listeners, seemed immoderate and unreasonable: for in the ignorant opinion of the majority Orkney was a group of boreal atolls, storm-swept, primitively inhabited, so unimportant and so perilously near the shadow of the Arctic that room for them could hardly be found on the map. But to the mild astonishment of a casual audience Magnus would speak of them as the home of Viking earls who had sat there and ruled all the islands of the north and the west and all the seas they could reach; and sometimes in high-flown mood he would claim descent on the distaff side from Magnus, that earl of Orkney who, in the year 1116, was murdered on the island of Egilsay. And he would say that his family had been lairds in Orkney, though of the smallest kind, from
the twelfth century, and that the Merrimans were, with some few other families—Fletts, Cloustons, Paplays, Linklaters, Heddles, Scarths, and so on—the true heirs and remnants of the old Norsemen. But neither of these statements was strictly true, for he was not descended from Earl Magnus, and the Merrimans had scarcely been four hundred years in Orkney. But despite this brevity his affection for the islands was well-founded, and the idea of returning to them was very comforting.

Before going, however, he would see Margaret once more, and after a discussion that should be kindly and cool and wise he would say good-bye to her, and as lovers they would never meet again. Hardly aware of what he did he then found paper and pen and began to write. An hour later he had composed a sonnet that gave him much satisfaction at the time, though on the following day he could find little merit in it:

It was a bad sonnet, but it served its purpose and sensibly relieved Magnus's feelings.—The mingled curse and blessing of all poets, good or bad, is that their emotions can be taken out and pinned to paper like butterflies in a collection-case. And there, however pretty they seem, with whatever hues of the celandine or the sunset or bitter blood they may be dyed, there's no more life in their wings, or perception of April and autumn in their bodies. Poets would soon die of exhaustion were their responses not prolific as
a spawning salmon is of eggs.—The bravado of the concluding couplet especially was restorative, and Magnus was comparatively cheerful when he went into the bedroom to look for cigarettes. But there he saw something that caused a new discomfiture.

In the precipitation of her dressing Margaret had forgotten her brassière, and it lay half under a chair like a puppy that has misbehaved. Its shape was vaguely pathetic but unhappily ridiculous. It suggested grape-skins discarded on the rim of a plate. Its wistful abatement produced in Magnus a corresponding collapse, and now he perceived in his defiant sonnet something that resembled, not a soldier's plume, but a mental brassière, a lace bandage for a sagging mind.

It is a proud thing to be the undefeated hero of a tragedy, but the victim of farce can find no comfort. That his love for Margaret should be destroyed with dust and tears was not incongruous in a world so thickly peopled with calamity; but it was intolerable that disaster should be mocked by this scrap of silk and ribbon, this cynical revelation of the falsity of women and the nature of their lying beauty. It struck him like a fool's bladder, and he saw himself again, as he had often seen himself before, the prey of a clowning destiny. Destructive laughter rang in his ears, and fate lay before him treacherous as a banana-skin.

I'm a buffoon, he thought: ‘I'm Troilus with a cold in his nose, not sighing but sneezing towards the Grecian tents. I'm Romeo under the wrong window, Ajax with a boil in his armpit, Priam with a hundred hare-lipped daughters, Roland with a pair of horns. But before God I'm a poet too, and I've weapons to defend myself. I can use words. I can make and mend what I please, I can plait words into whips, and like moles they'll burrow into the ground. I'm a poet. I can live in my own mind, as if it were a Border keep, and raid where I will. But I'll have no women in the house. I'll live alone and write alone till the whole country sees my strength.'

Like an explorer who travels through mountainous and wooded country with the noise of a giant waterfall in his ears, ever growing louder, and sees at last the feathery
precipitation of a lofty river, and hears that soft and falling whiteness magically make thunder on the rocks below, so Magnus in a vision saw the torrent of the English language flung down before him, with sunlight in its hair and the trapped strength of long centuries in its limbs, and heard alike the liquid melody of its verse and the clatter of its common little words and the sonorous fulmination of its most imperial majesty and Miltonic measure. He longed to throw himself into the stream below and battle in its strongest current and dive in the deepest pools for pearls. To master that river, that language! He would strive like an athlete for perfection, he would learn to be native in that element as a sea-Dyak, as an Eskimo in his frail canoe, as an albatross sleeping in the slow magniloquence of the Atlantic swell. He saw the river out-flood its banks and grow to an ocean that Shakespeare ruled in Neptune's place, and where, dyed like the dolphin for their death, Marlowe and Keats and Shelley spent their bright strength and sank beneath its waves.

‘By God, I'll be a poet!' said Magnus; and, still in his clothes, fell asleep on the tumbled bed from which Margaret had so lately fallen. In the next room the gas-fire poisoned the air, and sluggish wisps of fog crept through the window.

Magnus woke with a crapula and spent the morning packing and paying bills. He had rashly signed a year's lease of the flat, but he hoped, without much reason, to be able to sub-let it, and he made suitable arrangements for watch and ward with the caretaker who sustained a twilit and beetle-haunted existence in the basement. Then he telephoned to Margaret to request a last interview at which, to justify his sonnet, they would both behave with admirable composure, aware of sadness but showing nothing of it unless, perhaps, in the gentleness of their temper or in some phrase of slightest irony. Margaret, however, was not at home. A maid replied that she had been called out to a consultation.

Magnus found it a little strange that she should be able to conduct her life and her profession as though nothing had
happened while he, unshaved and queasy, his half-packed belongings scattered in awful confusion on the floor, showed so clearly the effects of disaster. He sat in a muddle of shirts and books; a dispatch-case full of press-cuttings and unanswered letters had spilled its contents upon a table where last night's glasses stood; a bowl of withered chrysanthemums drooped over a pair of evening trousers that lay limp and awry… And at this same moment Margaret, neat as a packet of pins and smart as new paint, would be discussing with a colleague—her voice calm and cool, her mind single, her knowledge all in trim array—some distemper of the colon, or cardiac lesion, as impersonally and efficiently as though she herself possessed neither heart nor bowels. There was something inhuman about women. They indeed were of the earth and as indomitably pursued the seasons. They, far more than men, were at home in the world, and moved with the cold certainty of a hostess from room to familiar room. Magnus reassured himself that for the future he would live celibate and strong in the inviolable tower of his mind—and busied himself with unimportant tasks until such time as he could again telephone to Margaret.

In the pocket of an old coat he discovered a forgotten letter from Francis Meiklejohn, the man with whom he had journeyed through Persia and the Caucasus on his way home from India. Meiklejohn was now a journalist in Edinburgh. He had written to Magnus: ‘Why the hell do you stay in London when there's room for you in Edinburgh? Come to Scotland. A renascence is on the way—political and literary—so come and be its midwife. You are, I suppose, a Nationalist? If you are not one already, you will be. There's a wind in the trees and a muttering in the heather. We talk of liberty when we're sober, and dream of it when drunk. Come to Scotland, you pestilent renegade.'

Magnus had a large affection for Francis Meiklejohn, who was an amiable talkative man, a great liar, and given to hearty enthusiasms. He now thought it would be a pleasant and convenient thing to spend a few days in Edinburgh before going farther north, for he would be glad to see Meiklejohn again, and it occurred to him that as he had not written to his people in Orkney for some considerable time he would
be well-advised to warn them of his intended visit. The reference to a Nationalist movement in Scotland did not interest him, though he was vaguely aware of its existence. There had been so many loud expressions of nationalism in post-war Europe that the muttering in Scottish heather had been almost inaudible. Such people as the Latvians and the Esthonians and the Czechs might well have good cause to fight for independence; but what freedom could Scots imagine that they did not already enjoy? Magnus concluded that the mutterers were simply cranks and oddities and splenetic seceders of the kind that fomented so much obscure disruption in the Church, and finally retired, in self-righteous defeat, to the moors where only whaups and lapwings could contradict them. Nationalism won't find a recruit in me, he thought; but I should like to see Frank again, and find out how many lies he's told about his travels abroad.

In the late afternoon he telephoned to Margaret, and again she was out; and in the early evening he was told that she was busy with postponed surgery patients. In a great hurry he turned to finish his packing, and made a feverish effort to catch the night train to Edinburgh. But his taxi was slow and he missed it by several minutes. He returned to Tavistock Square and slept once more in his disillusioned bed. In the morning he coldly refrained from any further attempt to communicate with Margaret, and arrived at King's Cross in ample time to secure a seat.

As they emerged, with gathering swiftness, from the far-reaching tentacles of London, Magnus felt a growing relief. A damp and sluggish air swathed the shapeless suburbs, and in its chill torpor the train grumbled as though impatient for the freedom of the grass-lands beyond. Then through winter fields, wet underfoot and flagrant with hideous advertisements for linoleum and quack lenitive and soapy purge—but aconite and hemlock were the only remedies for those who so beplastered the world—they ran at speed. Presently they came to more gracious country, and fields whose quietness the thieving metropolis had not yet robbed of dignity. The train rocked and swayed on its bright steel lines, and raced for the approaching north. Elated by speed and the illusion
of escape Magnus went to the restaurant car and drank with a new delight to think that Bacardi rum should trickle down his gullet while his gullet was hurled from county to county at seventy splendid miles an hour.

Two girls sat near him. They were well-groomed, smartly clad, and they spoke of nothing in particular in clear high-pitched confident voices. They looked at Magnus with cool appraisement. For a moment he cast about for some phrase or contrivance with which to enter into conversation with them, but he remembered instead his resolution to have nothing to do with women. He asked for another cocktail and plumed himself on this high indifference. This was freedom. Whereas he had lately thought of woman occupying the world like the mistress of her own house, he now beheld her earth-bound and woefully situated between the horns of an eternal dilemma. He alone, by virtue of the poetry in him, was free of the world. But women were condemned for ever to the wearisome burden of love or to celibate starvation. These girls, uneasily aware of their position, were meanwhile, precarious as a tight-rope walker, balancing between the horns. But he, in the solitude of poetry—doubly safe because most of it was unwritten—was gloriously independent. His mind, exultant, quickened with an idea, with rhythm and a phrase, and he began to write on the back of the menu card.

‘Un peu cabotin,' said one of the girls.

The other shrugged her shoulders and lit a cigarette.

Unaware of these disparaging comments Magnus continued to write, and had presently composed, with buoyant cynicism, some verses which he called
Miss Wyatt and Mrs
Leggatt
:

The composition of this poem and the enchanted delight that an author may feel in the first flush of creation—but never again—occupied a large part of the journey. Racing against the coming night, the train roared through the northern marches and crossed the bridge at Berwick. Colder air blew through an open window. Scotland lay hidden in the early dusk of winter.

A tearing robustious wind greeted Magnus in Edinburgh. He drove to an hotel in George Street and after a little while went out again to look for Francis Meiklejohn.

The wind hurried him along Princes Street. It blew with a bellow and a buffet on his stern and half-lifted his feet from the pavement. It beat his ears with a fistful of snow, and clasped his ribs with icy fingers. It tore the clouds from the sky, and laid bare, as if beyond the darkness, the cold grey envelope of outer space. Heads bent and shoulder thrusting like Rugby forwards in a scrum, east-bound pedestrians
struggled against it, and westward travellers flew before it with prodigious strides. To the left, towering blackly, like iron upon the indomitable rock, was the Castle. To it also the storm seemed to have given movement, for as the clouds fled behind its walls the bulk of its ancient towers and battlements appeared to ride slowly in the wind's eye, as though meditating a journey down the cavernous channel of the High Street to Holyroodhouse, its deserted sister.

Magnus tingled to the heart with cold and his spirit soared in pride. He was in Scotland again. He had come home after far voyaging, and the ghosts of his own country thronged about him. Out of its bloody history came figures armour-clad and tartan-breeched. Now the wind carried a noise of swords, and now its speed was the naked charging of the clans down a bare hillside. It slackened for a moment to sing a dirge in the chimney-tops, and cry in a stony coign the dolorous rhyme of Flodden and Culloden. It roared against high walls as though against the sails of a great ship. Far to the north and the west the islands of Scotland lay like the lost galleys of the Norsemen, and like them were lashed by the ceaseless waves. Pine-forests bent to the storm, and the mountains divided the blast to shout over frozen corries the wildness of their Gaelic names.

It is no niggard welcome that winter finds in Scotland, but every room is opened to its bitter violence as freely, as generously, as later they are opened to the daedal beauty and soft airs of spring.