Magnus Merriman (3 page)

From Baku their journey, through Tiflis to Batum and thence by a very dirty coasting vessel to Constantinople, was made anxious by failing resources, and they returned to England in complete poverty aboard a tramp steamer. But this excursion, allied to his war experience, eventually proved very remunerative and gave Magnus material for the novel that established—in a contemporary way—his literary reputation, and made for him a modest fortune of some three or four thousand pounds.

For the next two years he lived thinly by journalism in Manchester, where he tasted but swiftly rejected the principles of Liberalism, and wrote a book called
The Aristocrats
. This was a study of Byron, Shelley, and Swinburne, that defended their aristocratic assumption of social privileges and contempt of social obligations, and discovered in such noble freedom the true source of their poetry's opulent abundance. The book was more anti-social than Byron, Shelley, or Swinburne, and its reception by English critics, with their humane and democratic tendencies, was neither flattering nor hospitable. But it attracted the favourable attention of Mr Julius James Funk, the proprietor of several American newspapers, who was then holiday-making in England, and as the result of his interest Magnus was offered and accepted the literary editorship of the Philadelphia
News-Sentinel
.

He greatly enjoyed his residence in that charming city, whose cultured urbanity was securely established on a solid foundation of political corruption, and he devoted his leisure to a novel inspired by his travels on the western fringe of Central Asia. It was called
The Great Beasts Walk Alone
. It was published in the early autumn of 1930, and in October Magnus returned to England, resigning his post
on the
News-Sentinel
for no better reason than a restless desire for change.

By all but one or two critics and a handful of the reading public in England and America the novel was completely misunderstood and vastly enjoyed. It sold in thousands, and the mild, passionless, and commercially disciplined inhabitants of London and Leeds and Birmingham, of Cincinnati and Buffalo and Kansas City, of Sydney and Cape Town and Toronto, thrilled to its recital of wild adventure and back-breaking love without ever seeing or suspecting that all it said was a villainous attack on the trim security and standardized monotony of their daily lives.
The
Great Beasts Walk Alone
was the story of Stenka Potocki, a fictitious Cossack who, in revolt against the Soviet Union, endeavoured to establish a principality in Turkestan. His creed was individualism, his military tactics were guerrilla tactics, his morals were those of Casanova, his appetite was the appetite of Falstaff, his humour was Rabelaisian, and his ally was a rascally Chinese, a fat and learned man, sometime Governor of Kashgar, who had been expelled for behaviour too fat and rascally, too anciently absolute, to be permitted even in the Chinese Governor of a Central Asian town.

Warfare, feasting, and love were the staple of their exploits: swords and pillows and mutton-stews were the common furniture of their existence: but the principle of their lives was opposition to the encroaching machinery, the invading tractors and communal discipline, of the Soviets. Their licence was reactionary, their pillage had its philosophy, and every khan their tribesmen burnt reduced to ashes the abominations of the modern world. These implications, however, were generally unremarked by the readers of
The
Great Beasts Walk Alone
, who found all the entertainment they desired in the recital of night-marches, sudden evasions, the Chinese Governor's happy impropriety of speech, and the amorous belabouring of women and unwedded maids in Turkestan, Bokhara, Khiva, Khorasan and Khokan.

It was at the height of its success when Merriman returned to London, and for several weeks he enjoyed such popularity as a literary triumph may bring, whether its significance be recognized or not, and he ate many dinners at the expense
of the kindly or curious people who had read or intended to read a novel so well-esteemed and so widely advertised. For a little time these attentions pleased him, but he soon became bored by them. Then, by the intermediacy of a common friend, he met Margaret Innes again.

Within a year of going from Inverdoon she had married an elderly and wealthy manufacturer in Bradleigh, and for four years she had lived in circumstances of great comfort but no great happiness. Then her husband died, leaving her with two children and an income very much smaller than she had expected: for owing to some obscure estrangement he had revoked an earlier will scarcely a month before his death, and devised instead a testament that bequeathed four-fifths of his fortune to local charities. Faced with this disappointment, Margaret very sensibly decided to make use of her medical training, and realizing some part of her legacy bought a practice in Twickenham, where she settled down to work with all her former competence.

A fortnight after meeting Magnus, and after a very good dinner, she yielded to his importunity and went to bed with him in the furnished flat he had taken in Tavistock Square.

It would be inaccurate to say that Margaret Innes had been Merriman's first love, for at the age of fifteen he had been intemperately moved by a woman of some eight years his senior, and during the next decade his emotions were exercised with great regularity; and it would be misleading to imply that during his residence abroad he had been true to her memory, for he discovered sentimental occasions both in India and America. Yet in a manner he had been faithful, since despite the separation of two years he had remembered her and sometimes, when the company was small and the wine abundant and the night air melancholy, he had spoken of her to friends moved in a like manner to luxuries of recollection; while after a fashion she had priority to his affections, since she was the first and so far the only woman with whom he had seriously considered marriage. When he met her again his love awoke, strong and hungry
as a bear emerging from its winter sleep, and romantically persuading himself that it had never slumbered he drove it to a precipitate consummation.

Wedlock and time had impaired Margaret's chastity. She was, moreover, impressed by the new fame of her old admirer, and touched by his sincere though inaccurate protestations of several years' fidelity to her. She was quite pleased to go to bed with him and accepted his embraces with complaisance and a certain vanity. But she did not provoke embraces, and she contributed to the occasion nothing more valuable than acquiescence and the display of comeliness. She agreed to dine with him again in a few days' time, and in that happy expectation Magnus was hardly aware of any imperfection in the present. The affair lasted for some weeks, and he gradually became depressed by it. Margaret's attractions were less distinguished and more limited than he had found them a few years earlier, and her essential remoteness, her intangible secret power that had once allured him, he now discovered to be merely self-absorption. She had no great interest in anything but herself and her children, and while it was to her credit as a mother that she should postpone embraces to speak of Nigel's talent for drawing, and Rosemary's interest in religion, it did not contribute to her success as a lover. But she appeared quite willing to continue as Merriman's mistress.

One evening in January he was waiting for her somewhat resentfully in a restaurant that she favoured not so much for its food as for its customers, many of whom were well-known theatrical and literary people. She was late. Magnus drank some sherry and began to hope that she would not come. The noise of the restaurant irritated him, and the surrounding laughter and conversation, hard and brittle as the clink of plates and glasses, roused an impatient desire to silence it with some outrageous gesture. He thought how pleasant it would be to hurl his table, with its load of cutlery and crockery, into a neighbouring dinner-party, wine glasses spilling their load on naked and astounded shoulders, knives and forks clattering against the white armour of evening shirts—or to run amok with that wagon of hors d'oeuvres and succulently bespatter the room with a tropical storm of
anchovies and olives; here a flutter of red cabbage, there a damp vari-coloured imprint of Russian salad, a miraculous draught of sardines, the chill descent of eggs, and the thick impingement of cold potatoes. His pleasure in this vision mitigated his dislike of the diners who inspired it, and when Margaret arrived he was fairly cheerful.

At the age of twenty-nine she was very nearly as pretty as she had been at twenty-two, and what little she had lost was more than recouped in the smartness of her attire. The provincial gaiety that characterized her dress in Inverdoon had given way to a well-thought-of obedience to fashion, and she had learnt the proper use of cosmetics. She apologized for her lateness without embarrassment.

‘I've been terribly busy,' she said. ‘Everybody's got influenza, and I've scarcely had time to sit down for days. I nearly rang you up to say that I couldn't come out tonight, but I wanted to, so I hurried through the surgery patients and let Nanny put the children to bed. I told Nigel where I was going, and he asked me if I meant to marry you. He's got very grown-up ideas, and he's fearfully interested in you.'

‘Hors d'oeuvres or smoked salmon?' asked Magnus.

‘Smoked salmon, I think. What's the matter? Aren't you feeling well? You look terribly gloomy. It's this beastly weather. I need a holiday myself: I'd go abroad if I could, but the practice, of course, ties me down hand and foot.'

‘You look fit enough.'

‘Well, I'm too busy to be really ill, but I do need a holiday, and if I were as free as you are, I'd take one. Why don't you go away for a while?'

‘I'm going to.'

‘I'm sure that's the best thing to do. I'll miss you terribly, but you'll be much more cheerful when you come back, and we'll go on having a good time, won't we?'

‘I shan't come back,' said Magnus.

Like a flock of sheep in the morning, gently moving in a mist whose fringes are pale gold and briar-pink, Margaret's words travelled with a deceptive grace: but examine them coolly and they were nothing more than butcher's sheep. Once upon a time Magnus had thought them like antelopes. They had seemed to leap from dark coverts and speed with
curious significance among innominate flowers. But now he perceived the unmistakable flavour of mutton, and in the instant of recognition he remembered, from a poem called
The Princess of Scotland
, a stanza that read:

As in the case of most poetry the assertion was, of course, quite untrue. But the idea was excellent, and confronted with its mellifluous wealth Magnus decided it was foolish to spend more time in exchanging barren thoughts in the bankrupt tongue that not only Margaret used, but the threescore surrounding diners and the farther circumference of London's five or six or seven million inhabitants. He had a sudden vision of Gaelic and Greek in amiable contest among the mountains of Western Scotland or the tall black closes of Edinburgh—Pindaric ode stilling its unlicensed rhythm for the wilder nose of Ossian—and he determined to go northwards. He had not been in Scotland for nearly five years.

Margaret was puzzled and mortified by this resolution, so unexpected and declared so brusquely. Her mouth, opened slightly for a fragment of smoked salmon, remained patent in bewilderment. It was a charming mouth, and the hue of the salmon was precisely that of the outer part of her lips; but the inner part, devoid of cosmetic, was noticeably paler.

‘But you said you were going to live in London,' she objected. ‘You can't possibly leave it for good. Why, for anyone like you it's the only place in the world to live in.'

‘I don't agree with you,' said Magnus. ‘It's far too big; it's disgustingly untidy; its amusements are dull and its climate is abominable. ‘I've fallen out of love with it—or rather I've discovered that the idea I had of it is not justified by actuality—and so I'm going to leave it. London, I trust, will not be seriously affected by my desertion.'

‘Have you fallen out of love with me, too?'

‘Are you in love with me? Or are you simply enjoying an adventure?'

‘You're part of my life. You have been for years, and I can't bear to let you go. You and Nigel and Rosemary—'

‘I should make an abominable step-father.'

‘Oh, why do you turn everything into a joke? This isn't a joke to me. I'm terribly upset.'

‘Good God! I'm as serious as you are: if I talk lightly it's only for relief. I always seem flippant when I'm really in earnest. Do you know that Aeneas told a dozen bawdy stories to Dido just before he left her? There's no use asking who said so, for I don't think anyone did, but I'm perfectly sure it's true. And don't imagine that Aeneas was a provincial seducer having a bit of greasy fun with a taxi-dancer. There was hell in his heart when he left Carthage. But he had to go, and so have I. Look here, what are we going to drink?'

Magnus's eloquence had always had a slightly bemusing effect on Margaret. She listened to him with a certain remoteness—observing but not sharing the entertainment—in a way that a small boy will watch the conjurer at a party. Her unhappiness and hurt vanity were now mollified by his words as by a poultice, and she controlled her feelings enough to turn the pages of the wine-list. Presently, without reading what she saw, she said, a little sulkily: ‘I'd like some Montrachet.'

Magnus leaned forward eagerly. ‘Would you really?' he asked. ‘It's a magnificent wine: I had no idea that you knew it. I thought your repertory consisted of champagne and Liebfraumilch and Benedictine.'

‘You don't know everything about me,' said Margaret crossly. Magnus's estimate of her knowledge of wine had been very nearly correct: she had overheard, in casual conversation, the name Montrachet, and she had asked for it as a gesture of independence, to show that she was not compelled to seek her partner's advice when Liebfraumilch was not to her fancy. But her apparently sapient and certainly unexpected discrimination delighted Magnus, and he began to talk with great gusto and cordiality about the merits of the wine she had chosen. For a little while his old belief in her returned to life; perhaps there really was some secret virtue in her; since, without his knowing it, she had been aware of Montrachet, she might have other wisdom unperceived by
him, other wealth of character, and treasures of knowledge. She was undeniably lovely, and to beauty much may be credited.

When the wine came he drank heartily, and Margaret took her share rather as one who thirsts than as a connoisseur. For a little while she talked with wistful reminiscence of their youthful love-making in Inverdoon. Then she spoke of her marriage.

‘I married Lawrence for his money,' she said abruptly. ‘I'd never had a penny before that: I was desperately poor at University. I hated him really, and the honeymoon was agony. After we got home I didn't sleep with him for months. He was terribly unhappy, but I couldn't do it. Then Nigel was born, and I didn't think of anyone but him. After that I had an affair with another man. I was careless and I found that I was going to have a baby, so I made it up with Lawrence and persuaded him, when the time came, that Rosemary was his. But she wasn't. He didn't suspect anything to begin with, but I quarrelled with him again, and I think he guessed the truth at last. That's why he made a different will and left all his money to those damned charities.'

To Magnus this bald narrative was very exciting. He felt a certain horror as he looked at this mercenary and wanton woman and saw in her, under so little apparent change, the chaste and elusive Margaret of his University days. But he admired her, after a fashion, for the cold straightforward way in which she had told her story—it was so much better than her usual chattering—and he also admired, with the kind of admiration a good play compels, the competence, save in one particular, with which she had arranged her life. He was conscious, too, of an irrational jealousy of Rosemary's unknown father.

‘Have you had any other lovers?' he asked.

‘One other,' said Margaret.

Self-pity came noisily into his mind. He felt betrayed. It seemed to him that he had been true to her for years while she had been faithless and incontinent. He forgot his own dalliance with other women in the surge of so exquisite a misery: he forgot the months and quarters during which he had never given Margaret a thought.
She had deceived him and made naught of his devotion. But accompanying this misery there arose a more combative thought: he warmly desired to take yet more advantage of her incontinence, and with his own image he wanted to obliterate her memories of his predecessors in love. By sleeping with her once again he could forget his sorrow and at the same time revenge himself on the unknowns who had, it seemed, so cruelly cuckolded him.

His voice deepened. ‘So I'm merely one in the procession, but you're the only woman I've ever loved,' he said, and believed most truly his own veracity. ‘I came home from the war and you took me captive, and I'll never be free of you. I've scattered memories of you over half the world. I've thought of you in temples in Benares, in New Orleans, and in Oregon in the snow. I took you over the Elburz mountains with me, and across the Caspian. I've loved you in three continents and a dozen seas, Meg.'

‘And now, when you could love me quite simply, without needing a map to help you, you're going to go away and leave me?'

‘Oh, I don't know. I was angry and wretched when I said that. Let's have some brandy, and then we'll go back to my flat.'

In the taxi, on the way to Tavistock Square, Margaret carefully eluded an embrace and said: ‘You know, Nigel is really an astonishing child. He reads the papers now, and he's so serious about the news. He came to me the other day and said: “Mummy, what is the League of Nations, and what is it
for
?”'

‘I hope you told him,' said Magnus, a trifle bitterly.

‘Well, I said that he wasn't old enough to understand yet, and that he'd better go away and play with his soldiers. He's really fond of playing at soldiers.'

An hour later Margaret sat up in bed, patted the pillow, and said in an interested voice: ‘Your ears are quite hot now. A little while ago they were as cold as ice.'

Magnus stretched himself luxuriously and quoted to the ceiling:

‘I'm going to see that Nigel starts Latin quite soon,' said Margaret, ‘and I think Rosemary should learn it too, so that they can help each other. I'm rather worried about her at present: she's terribly interested in religion. Nanny says that she'll sit in the bathroom singing “Jesus loves me” for hours at a time.'