Magnus Merriman (6 page)

‘You weren't exaggerating when you said that Nationalism was sweeping the country?' he asked.

‘That's the simple truth,' said Meiklejohn earnestly. ‘Of course you'll find a lot of people who don't believe in it, but that's because they don't believe in anything but sitting still and keeping their bottoms warm. There are bottom-warmers in every country on earth, and there always have been. You needn't pay any attention to them. But all the people in Scotland who think for themselves are Nationalists, and all the people who feel they're really different from the English: the men you meet in the Highlands, and the Outer Isles, and in low pubs. Let's go to a pub in the High Street. There'll be nothing half-hearted or English or respectable about it. Or shall we look for Hugh Skene? He's probably in the Cosmopolitan just round the corner.'

Hugh Skene was a poet whose work had excited more controversy than any Scottish author had been flattered by for many years. Those who admired his writing declared him to be a genius of the highest order, and those who disliked it, or could not understand it, said that he was a pretentious versifier who concealed his lack of talent by a ponderous ornamentation of words so archaic that nobody knew their meaning: for Skene's theory was that the English language, having become devitalized by time, was incapable of sustaining any vigorous or truly poetic meaning, and that the proper material for Scottish writers was Gaelic or the
ancient language of Henryson and Dunbar. But whatever his merits he had roused much argument, and Magnus was eager to meet him.

The Cosmopolitan was noisier and more populous than the Café de Bordeaux and Meiklejohn failed to find Skene in the crowd. He made his way with difficulty to the bar and asked the barman if he had seen him.

‘He was here a while back,' said the barman, ‘but he wasna looking very weel, and he went early. He said the beer had upset his stomach.'

Somewhat saddened by this discovery of frailty in the constitution of a fellow-Scot, Meiklejohn and Magnus left the clamorous bar and walked towards the High Street. The weather had moderated. Having completed its
allegro
movement, the storm had passed with diminished vigour to an
andante
of pleasing melancholy. The wind no longer leapt from wall to pavement, lifting with a shout and cold finger protesting skirts, but in the farther purlieus the sky debated with fleeing clouds a serious and more gentle theme. Pale stars came into view, against a lighter background and the old tall houses of the High Street showed in solid darkness. From Holyroodhouse to the Castle the ridge runs, hard and high, like the rough spine of Edinburgh, and the tall houses are its vertebrae, and in its marrow is a wilder life than that which animates the dignified terraces and sedate Georgian crescents below. Those lofty houses are not an aristocracy decayed and subdued, but an aristocracy debauched and ruined, sprawling in rags and dirt where it once flaunted itself in threadbare finery and three-piled pride, and lived in the high perfume of insolence and treachery and blood. As a wounded eagle, scabby and fly-infected, is a nobler and more tragic spectacle than a sick barnyard fowl, so are those houses, once turbulent with all the nobility of Scotland, more tragic and nobler than houses of the solid citizenry abandoned in the dull ebb of fashion. And as an eagle, even in its last hours, will shake from its feathers the buzzing flies, and rise in its excrement to fight, so do those houses seem fiercer than shop-keeping brick and mortar, and those who inhabit them, breathing the spirit of their dead greatness, have more vitality than their more respectable neighbours.

Magnus, who had been unusually quiet, was still disinclined for conversation. He was conscious of opposing arguments in his mind. On the one hand there was a romantic urging to believe all Meiklejohn said and to throw himself into the task of re-fashioning on prouder lines his native country—how splendid, how intoxicating, to assist in the rebirth of a nation!—and on the other hand there was a colder and more rational inclination to discount Meiklejohn's assertions and to pursue his original plan of securing happiness and fame for himself in the solitude of poetry. He had intended to retreat from life, and now he was tempted to advance into its liveliest activity. He thought with regret of the peace he had contemplated, but the prospect of action grew more and more alluring. He still tried to convince himself of the wisdom of selfishness and regression, but his natural inclinations depreciated his arguments and beckoned him forward.

Meiklejohn, now silent also, was somewhat ill-tempered. The irritation caused by the golfers' mockery of Nationalist aspirations had been aggravated by disappointment at not finding Hugh Skene, and his pride as a host was hurt by the failure of the evening to achieve the high degree of conviviality that he desired. Down his throat and his guest's had gone generous draughts of vodka and Chablis, of claret and brandy, and yet both were disappointingly sober. They should have been shouting to the stars. But wine is a fickle thing.

Like a great battlement the north side of the High Street confronted them. From their lower level a long flight of steps led upwards, a narrow passage between black walls whose farther end was invisible, and on whose middle distance a lamp shone dimly. Here and there on the steps, obscurely seen, were vague figures. Under the lamp, with harsh voice and combative gesture, two men were quarrelling. Another, oblivious to them and perhaps to all the world, leaned against the wall with drooping head. From the high remote darkness of the passage came the shrill sound of a woman laughing, and from the tavern whose door the lamp lighted there issued, muffled by the walls, the multifarious sound of talk and argument and rival songs.

Meiklejohn grew more cheerful as they climbed the steps, and he pushed his way impatiently past the men at the door. One of them turned indignantly and asked him where the hell he thought he was going. Meiklejohn paid no attention, and the man followed him into the crowded bar, his temper ruffled, bent on pursuing this new quarrel.

‘Hey!' he said, and took Meiklejohn by the shoulder, ‘did you no hear me? Or are you deaf as well as blind?'

‘That's all right,' said Meiklejohn.

‘Oh, that's all right, is it?' said the man with an offensive parody of Meiklejohn's voice.

Magnus spoke soothingly: ‘He hasn't done you any harm. If he pushed you it was only by accident.'

‘And what the hell's it got to do with you?' asked the quarrelsome man. ‘It's him I'm talking to. Can he no answer for himself?' He glared fiercely at Magnus. He was a square-shouldered fellow, very shabbily dressed, but nimble and soldierly, and his face was red and bony and truculent. Then, slowly, his expression altered. Pugnacity gave place to surprise, to recognition, and finally to beaming pleasure. ‘Christ!' he said, ‘it's Merriman, the beggar that stuck his bayonet up the Captain's airse at Festubert!' He turned and called to the companion with whom he had been arguing outside. ‘Here's a bloke that'll tell you the truth! I said the war was a bloody picnic in '15, and so it was. We had a bloody picnic for three weeks at Bécourt.'

Magnus had now remembered the red-faced man as a former comrade in the Gordon Highlanders. ‘Sergeant Denny,' he exclaimed, and shook hands with him enthusiastically. Denny introduced his companion. ‘He was a bloody conscript,' he said, ‘and didn't come out till '17. And now he starts telling me what the war was like.'

The other man, whose name was McRuvie, muttered: ‘It wasna a picnic for the Black Watch, onyway.'

‘It would have been if you'd come out soon enough,' said Denny. ‘Three bloody weeks at Bécourt and a hot dinner every day, and the officers sleeping in real beds, and every bloody morning I picked a bunch of flowers on the parados and put 'em in a jam-pot on the fire-step!'

‘Ach, to hell! Who shot the cheese?' said McRuvie.

Magnus hurriedly ordered three pints of beer, before his reference to an old regimental scandal could aggravate the quarrel to violence: for the Gordons were sensitive about the allegation that they had once opened fire on a ration cheese, mistaking its pallor in the dusk for the pale face of an enemy.

It was difficult to maintain a conversation in the bar, for there was a great deal of noise and the customers stood so close to each other that a man might easily drink out of his neighbour's glass did not the latter keep good watch on it. Tobacco, the smell of beer and whisky, and a heavy odour of dirty clothes made the air so thick as almost to be visible. Cigarette smoke floated in thick whorls that were disturbed by the vibration of the floor above, where apparently a reel was being danced. Meiklejohn had fallen into talk with a little old shrivelled man in ragged trousers and more ragged coat whose face, unshaved and grey, wore a look of half-witted cunning. Meiklejohn shouted through the crowd to Magnus.

‘Come and listen to this,' he said. ‘I've found a minstrel, a ballad-singer. He's got the finest song I've heard for years.'

The little man winked lewdly. Each hand held a glass of beer that Meiklejohn had bought for him. In a thin husky voice he began to sing:

At Magnus's other elbow McRuvie had just referred to Sergeant Denny's regiment as the Kaiser's Bodyguard.

‘Away and play at Broken Squares!' replied Denny ferociously.

These twin vilifications—the former a bitter reference to a stain on the Gordons' honour, the latter recalling an unhappy incident in the history of the Black Watch—brought the argument to a head. McRuvie hit Denny on the nose, and Denny knocked McRuvie down with a right hook to the jaw. The noise increased with this sudden excitement
and a great deal of beer was spilled as everyone turned to so violent a centre of interest. Two barmen forced their way through the crowd, and without waste of time seized hold of Denny and flung him out of doors. Then they returned, and finding McRuvie preparing to follow his enemy they sternly warned him of the consequences, and by a timely reference to the police persuaded him to stay where he was.

Meiklejohn was annoyed by this interruption of the little man's ballad, but when on all sides, awakened by the regimental breeze, reminiscences of the war rose to the surface of men's memories and into the thick yellow-lighted air fell the names of Givenchy and Sanctuary Wood and Poperinghe—half these ragged fellows, these slouching dole-men, these pot-bellied deformities, had once stood rigid and magnificent on parade, and marched behind the pipes with kilts swinging, and eaten their food under storm-clouds of death—when these memories found tongue Magnus was engaged in conversation by an ill-formed and evil-smelling lump of a man who proudly pulled up his trouser-leg and showed on his grimy skin a long and puckered scar.

High Wood disputed with the Labyrinth, the mud at Louvencourt rivalled as a topic of humour and delight the carnage at Mont St Eloi. In red leather volumes in the Memorial on the Castle Rock were the myriad names of the Scottish dead, and here in the lively squalor of a lousy tavern were their comrades who had survived, and whose names were nowhere written—unless perhaps on the wall of a jakes. But they were alive and, for the moment, rich with their memories. They had marched on foreign soil and killed their country's enemies. Thin-ribbed with hunger, or gross with civilian fat they might be, shambling in their gait and dismal in their dress they were, but once their buttons had shone bright, and their shoulders were square, and they were Gordons and Seaforths and Camerons. They had worn the Red Hackle, and ridden on jolting limbers, and swallowed with their ration beef the acrid taste of danger. Here, with foul shirts and fouler breath, were Mars's heroes. Kings had fallen and nations perished, armies had withered and cities been ruined for this and this alone:
that poor men in stinking pubs might have great wealth of memory.

Magnus, perceiving this irony, was delighted by it, but Meiklejohn, with no military recollections of his own, was merely upset by the loss of his ballad-singer, who had disappeared in the commotion.

‘What debased pleasure do you find in looking at that filthy sore?' he asked Magnus, who was examining with interest the wound on the dirty man's skin.

Magnus answered:

‘Don't quote that sentimental barbarian to me,' said Meiklejohn irritably. ‘You miss the chance of hearing a damn fine Scots song and then you recite Shakespeare. This is a pub, not a girls' school matinée.'

‘What the hell has a girls' school got to do with Shakespeare?' asked Magnus.

Meiklejohn ignored him. ‘Let's go upstairs. Perhaps the little man's there.'

On the upper floor of the tavern were another bar and a small dingy lounge. Following Meiklejohn up the stairs Magnus quoted, somewhat contentiously:

and asked: ‘Is that stuff for girls?'

‘Certainly, if they're nasty girls,' said Meiklejohn.

The upper floor was even noisier than the lower one, for on the latter had been nothing but men, but here there were women also. A few were elderly, pouchy-faced, wide in the hips, with over-flowing contours, but most were young. A cocksure strutting little creature with pointed breasts, black eyes, a loose mouth and oiled black hair took Magnus by the coat and said: ‘Hey! are you sleeping with me or am I sleeping with you tonight?'

‘Neither,' said Magnus.

‘Och! Be a man! I'll no tell your mother, if that's what you're thinking. Gie's a drink, anyway.'