Magnus Merriman (8 page)

Then, with the quotation of this ample and sonorous line for a last defiance, he collapsed and fell backwards on the stone.

Under the protection of alcohol a man may confront the most appalling fortune with equanimity, and while he walked with his escort to the Central Police Station, Magnus was unperturbed by the fact of his arrest and the possibility that Meiklejohn was seriously hurt. Like a cloudy nimbus the fumes of all he had drunk now veiled his mind, and within that delicate circumvallation he felt calm as an Oriental philosopher contemplating the whimsical illusion of the world from the exquisitely poised foundation of his own unreality. The very act of walking was performed without any sense of physical effort. He seemed rather to float by the policeman's side, as though indeed he were sitting on a lotus-flower, air-borne like Gautama. Smoothly and gravely—but not too much—he talked with the constable as he was wafted along, and the constable, a good friendly fellow, was charmed by his manner and expressed his belief that Meiklejohn was not seriously hurt after all.

‘A dunt on the heid's no great matter when a man's drunk,' he said consolingly. ‘It's damned easy to kill a man when he's sober, but it takes time and forethought to do it when he's fou'.'

The other policeman had taken McRuvie and Sergeant Denny in charge. They also were now quiet and contemplative, and they meekly carried to the police-station the coats which Magnus and Meiklejohn had discarded. They
had already been charged when Magnus and his escort arrived, for the latter had waited till the ambulance came for Meiklejohn.

The station sergeant was a benign little man with spectacles and he listened with sorrowful disapproval while the nature of Magnus's breach of the peace and assault upon Meiklejohn was described to him.

‘A person like you shouldn't be found brawling in the streets,' he said, ‘for if you want to get drunk you can do it quietly and decently in your own house.'

Magnus bowed under the rebuke. ‘I can only apologize,' he said with rather ponderous courtesy. ‘I'm afraid that I lost my temper. My friend and I were discussing a literary problem, and literature, if you take it seriously, is a great breeder of quarrels. I once knew a man who was shot for describing another's verses as catalectic, which they were. But the author thought he had said “cataleptic”.'

‘That may be,' said the sergeant. ‘But the constable says you were using very filthy language.'

‘I was quoting Shakespeare.'

The sergeant scratched his chin. ‘There was a man brought in on the same charge last week, and he said he had been quoting the Bible.'

‘It may be that all great literature is anti-social in its effects,' Magnus suggested.

‘Then there's your friend,' said the sergeant, ‘who may be very badly hurt. I might overlook the swearing, considering the circumstances, but I can't overlook a fractured skull.'

At this moment, however, the door opened and Meiklejohn, very dirty from rolling down the steps, came in with a policeman close behind him. On the way to the hospital he had suddenly recovered consciousness, and the constable in attendance, finding there was nothing seriously wrong with him, had decided a doctor's attention would be wasted on him and that he had better be charged with the others.

The sergeant now decided that there was nothing very serious in the case, and offered to release the prisoners on security of two pounds apiece if they promised to indulge in no more literary discussion that night.

‘And if you don't find it convenient to appear before the
magistrate on Monday morning you'll forfeit your bail and justice will be satisfied without troubling you further,' he explained. He mentioned that Denny and McRuvie might also be liberated on security, and Magnus paid a pound each for their freedom. Then the police bade them all goodnight with great cordiality, and they parted outside the station to go their several ways home.

Magnus and Meiklejohn walked together downhill to the Mound, exchanging mutual apologies for their mutual assault, in which the amiability of their sentiments was made abundantly evident by prolixity and repeated assurance.

Meiklejohn especially was remorseful, in that he had outraged hospitality by insulting and thereafter striking his guest. He insisted on accompanying Magnus to his hotel, and there were tears in his eyes when, with a last freshet of words, he at length said good-night.

Magnus slept heavily and woke feeling so fresh and healthy as to be quite impenitent for the previous night's excesses. He was, indeed, so far from regret that he lay on his pillow and recalled the events of the evening with immoderate pleasure. An exquisite sensation of well-being suffused him as he stretched his legs and turned this way and that, feeling his muscles extend and contract, and gathering in the fold of memory one image after another from the rude comedy that had begun with Scottish Nationalism, passed through the temperate luxury of the Café de Bordeaux to the riotous delight of the High Street pub, included in its elastic form the inter-regimental rivalry of the Gordon Highlanders and the Black Watch, and concluded with the translation of Gautama to the police-station.

If this is Scotland, he thought, then Scotland is worth living in. And again the intoxicating idea returned that here in truth was a nation worth refashioning, and that might be the very moment dictated by some strange conjunction of the stars for its second birth, and that he, Magnus Merriman, would win a place in history not as a poet, but under the prouder title of patriot. He considered from what rank in life the liberators of the world, the leaders of new nations, had come; and a score of misty figures—soldiers, a country gentleman, a shabby professional Marxian, a Polish pianist,
a Cossack trooper—moved in his memory as if upon a screen. They were various as flowers in a cottage-garden, though hardly smelling so sweet. There was no reason why he, sometime a soldier, lately a journalist, and always a poet, should not do as they had done. So far as he could see, in the optimism of his present mood, there was only one factor that could possibly hinder him from becoming a patriot and the maker—at least in some degree—of a new nation: Scotland, as a whole, might not be inclined for re-making, or disposed to welcome patriots whose unruly ambition would bring upon her the pangs of renascence and commit her to a new gamble with fate and time. Despite the invigorating example of the new nations that, since the War, had sprung up like green crops and re-coloured the whole earth, Scotland might prefer to remain comfortably obscure in the broad shadow of England and console herself for national insignificance by counting the material advantages that accrued from her junior partnership in the Commonwealth. What chance for patriots then? It was true that Meiklejohn had said the whole country was restless and eager for change, but later events had compelled him to exclude all footballers and golfers from his potential revolutionaries. And that was a serious handicap to Nationalism.

But Magnus's spirit was too robust and buoyant to admit to difficulties for long. If Scotland did not yet want independence it should be made to want it. From a sentimental aspect the plea for it would be irresistible—and who but a libbed accountant, a gelded intellectual, could decry sentiment?—and though he was not yet aware of any material arguments in favour of political freedom, there were doubtless plenty, and Meiklejohn and Mrs Dolphin would know them all. The world was full of arguments, and the general condition of humanity was so unsatisfactory that one needed but little wit to elaborate a case for altering it, whether locally or all across the map. Magnus felt sure that there would be no difficulty in showing cause why Scotland should immediately assert her independence, and in all probability it could be shown that she would benefit from the change. Statistics were notoriously elastic and could bend both ways like any gymnast. During his residence in America he had
argued, time and again, that the British Empire was the most beneficent factor in world equations, and that the world's peace, the world's progress, and the world's prosperity all depended on the continued existence, strength, and prestige of the Empire. After that colossal task it would surely be simple to find arguments for the continued existence of so small a country as Scotland.

Elated by the prospect of activity so largely if not wholly altruistic, Magnus rose and dressed himself rapidly. After breakfast he seriously considered his financial position, for clearly, if he was to engage in politics, he must defer his visit to Orkney and settle himself in Edinburgh—and to live in Edinburgh would cost him a great deal more than living in Orkney. But he was secretly glad of the excuse to postpone his return to the islands, for after residing very comfortably in America and very warmly in India the prospect of a small house in Orkney under the boisterous winds and the pervading ocean-salted coldness of winter appealed to him less and less the more he thought of it. And, he reflected, he had not yet written to his people to warn them of his return. It would be better, on all counts, to stay for some time in Edinburgh.

He began to calculate his resources. He had saved £340 while he was in America, and in London he had earned £180 by casual journalism: in the flush of his novel's success his name had acquired a certain transient value, and various newspapers had commissioned him to write articles of no importance on such topics of scanty and ephemeral interest as were, in their editors' opinion, suitable for readers in suburban trains and provincial breakfast-rooms. But in London Magnus had lived somewhat extravagantly, and spent, in rather less than three months, rather more than £400. His earlier books had never earned anything but a little pocket money, and though now they were enjoying a slight increase in popularity, his income from royalties from them would not, in all probability, exceed another fifty pounds. And that was not due till June. His wealth lay almost entirely in
The Great Beasts Walk Alone
. A few days before leaving London his publishers had told him they had sold thirty-one thousand copies. His royalties on that
large sale would, he calculated, amount to something over £1,800. The book, moreover, was still selling two or three hundred copies a week; he had signed an agreement for an American edition by which he would receive an advance of £250 on account of royalties; and negotiations were in progress for its translation into Swedish, Norwegian, Dutch and German. He felt comfortably well off and perfectly able to enter upon a political career.

He wrote to his publishers asking for an advance of £200 and, stating the calculation he had made, requested them to check its accuracy. Then he went out for a walk to inspect the capital city of the new sovereign state, and to see some of its soon-to-be independent burgesses.

But as it was Sunday the streets were empty, for those of its citizens who were not lying abed had gone to church. And in the morning light the Castle appeared somewhat flat and diminished in size from the vague grandeur of its darkling look.

Ten days later Magnus had settled himself in a small furnished flat in Queen Street, a row of tall flat-fronted houses whose residential dignity had been somewhat impaired by the invasion of offices and a few shops of a superior kind. His flat was at the top of the house and its windows looked north across gardens and a descending terrace of intersecting streets to a mistiness that in fine weather dissolved and revealed the steely brightness of the Forth. Beyond that were the ancient kingdom of Fife, soberly coloured, and the rising blue shadow of the Ochil hills, that outpost of the Highlands and a promise of farther heights.

In common with the ancient Athenians and the modern Americans, Magnus had a great liking for novelty, and would adopt a new fashion—in thought, in clothes or in behaviour—not only with enthusiasm but with such conviction that often it appeared to have been his own discovery. Already, following the example of Meiklejohn, he had abandoned smoking and taken to snuff, and his reasoning in favour of the latter commodity was more copious and incisive than his preceptor's; while his conversion to
Scottish Nationalism had been so complete that he could now remember perceiving its benefits, and formulating a programme for its attainment, some three years previously. He had spent several days in close study of the case for it, and many of the arguments were so cogent that he could not believe he had ever been ignorant of them. From that impression to the more positive one that he had himself enunciated them—and indeed he had enunciated so many arguments in favour or dispraise of so many things that he could not possibly remember them all—was a short and easy step, and he now regarded himself as one of the earliest apostles of the Scottish political renascence.

He had seen Meiklejohn several times, and he was at present reading a book called
The Flauchter-spaad
in preparation for meeting, in Meiklejohn's rooms, the poet Hugh Skene and the latter's less distinguished friend Padraig McVicar.
The Flauchter-spaad
was Skene's latest volume of poems, and the critics were, as usual, divided into two factions, one party calling it a work of superlative genius, the other declaring it, quite simply, to be gibberish. The general public, being ignorant of its very existence, reserved their opinion.

Among the disruptive phenomena that followed the Great War, not the least remarkable was the disruption, or threatened disruption, of language. In most of the so-called civilized countries of the world a group of writers had appeared who stated their belief that existing literary forms were no longer of significance or value, and that to express themselves fully serious writers must rediscover some prime vitality in the roots of language. This belief had shown itself in varying degrees. Many authors contented themselves with writing ungrammatically, some acquiring the art and others possessing it by nature: in America especially did illiteracy come to be encouraged and recognized for some little while as the distinguishing feature of the new literature. Other writers, by virtue, it may be, of some indomitable infantility in themselves—perhaps a mere hypothyroidism, or thymal persistence—reverted to nursery modes, and by the infinite repetition of simple sounds created for themselves the illusion of primordial meanings, but in less biased critics
fortified the conviction that compulsory education was by no means so efficacious as many people thought it. The poets of the post-war world were fairly united in their belief that poetry, to be poetical, must be unrhythmical, unrhymed and unintelligible: and by these standards their output was of a high order. Their leader was the American Eliot, who by incorporating in his verse, with frolic wilfulness, tags from half the literatures of the world, had become popular in more than strictly intellectual circles for the likeness of his work to a superior parlour-game called ‘Spot the Allusion' or ‘Favourite Quotations'. His protagonist in prose was the Irishman Joyce, and Joyce, with the genius of his people for destruction, had treated the English language as Irish tenants had not seldom treated the cattle, fields, and houses of an absentee English landlord, and built on the ruins an edifice far beyond normal comprehension and incomprehensibly charming. Faced with these attacks the English language withdrew into its shell, and conventional writing became somewhat pale and nerveless indeed.

In Scotland the chief exponent of literal revolution was Hugh Skene, and he, as has already been noticed, attempted to revive the ancient Scottish forms of speech. They had this advantage, at least, that they were fully as obscure as Joyce's neologisms or the asyntactical compressions of the young English poets. But as Skene's genius matured he discovered that the Scots of Dunbar and Henryson was insufficient to contain both his emotion and his meaning, and he began to draw occasional buckets from the fountains of other tongues. At this time it was not uncommon to find in his verse, besides ancient Scots, an occasional Gaelic, German, or Russian phrase. The title-poem of his new volume,
The Flauchter-spaad
, was strikingly polyglot, and after three hours' study Magnus was unable to decide whether it was a plea for Communism, a tribute to William Wallace, or a poetical rendering of certain prehistoric fertility rites. The opening stanza read:

This was fairly straightforward and the meaning was clear enough with the help of a glossary, but owing to a large infiltration of Russian and Gaelic the ensuing stanzas were extremely difficult, and Magnus put down the book feeling that should
The Flauchter-spaad
be discussed that evening he would need to be very discreet in giving his opinion of it.

Skene and McVicar were already there when Magnus arrived in Meiklejohn's rooms. He had some conversation with Mrs Dolphin before going in.

‘Take a look at McVicar's trousers,' she said. ‘You remember that business about Mr Meiklejohn's best evening pair going astray? Well, McVicar's wearing them now, and Mr Meiklejohn can't take them off him because he hasn't another pair to put on. He got his own torn to bits at a meeting at the Mound the other night. He was talking about Nationalism, but he speaks in a very solemn way and the crowd thought he was a Mormon, and rushed him.'

McVicar was indeed wearing a pair of black evening trousers, and only a dignified demeanour saved their companionship with a light tweed jacket from being ludicrous. But he was a young man so solemn, so grimly handsome, of so darkly fanatical a glance, that his clothes were of no importance. Sackcloth or the mantle of a prophet might have matched his bearing, but failing those his attire had no significance. It was merely a concession to the exigencies of a northern climate and to the prevailing mode that prescribed concealment for the human frame.

Skene, however, had gone to some trouble in selecting his raiment. His suit was unremarkably grey, but he wore a purple collar and shirt and a yellow tie with red spots. Apart from his clothes his appearance was sufficiently striking to suggest genius. He had a smooth white face, dwarfed by a great bush of hair, and in brisk, delicate, rather terrier-like features his eyes shone bright and steady. His hands were beautifully shaped and somewhat dirty. He greeted Magnus very cordially, and made some kindly references
not only to
The Great Beasts Walk Alone
, but to his earlier books of verse. Magnus took a liking to him and sat down beside him.

Meiklejohn, excellently cast in the character of a host, provided everyone with drinks, talked with abundant vivacity about French wines and French politics, and played on his gramophone, in rapid succession, excerpts from
Fledermaus
and
Figaro
.

‘Have you any modern music?' Skene asked.

‘I'm afraid not,' said Meiklejohn. ‘Don't you like Mozart?'

‘It doesn't mean much.'

‘Nothing written before 1920 has any great depth of meaning,' said McVicar gloomily.

Skene turned to Magnus and said: ‘So you've become a Nationalist, have you?'

‘Yes,' said Magnus. ‘But I didn't become converted in the usual way. There's nothing sentimental in my brand of nationalism. I'm quite cold about it. I've been abroad for the last few years, and some time ago I came to the conclusion—a fairly obvious one—that what is mainly wrong with the world is that there are too many great nations in it. Both Britain and the United States, for instance, are too big to be run efficiently. In countries of their size there's too much opportunity for abuse, and abuses become too widespread and complicated to be reformed. The only way to improve conditions in the great nations is to split them up and let each segment reform and control its own affairs. I believe in small nationalism because it would mean reducing the world to manageable areas. And, of course, small nations are safer to live in than big ones.'

‘I'm not interested in safety,' said Skene, ‘and I don't believe, as an ultimate thing, in small nationalism. I want to see the creation of a world state. I'm a Communist. And I'm a Scottish Nationalist because I believe that if Scotland were independent we could do a great deal towards establishing a central state in Western Europe.'

‘To hell with Communism!' said Magnus warmly.

‘Do you know what Communism is?'

‘It's a damned Oriental perversion, a funk-hole for weaklings, an attempt to turn the world into an ant-hill!'

Magnus stopped suddenly in his catalogue, though a dozen other definitions, equally offensive, had already occurred to him. He perceived that he was unnecessarily rude to a fellow-guest, and apologized for being so dogmatic in the utterance of personal opinions.

‘But still,' he concluded, ‘I'm perfectly convinced that my opinion is correct.'

‘Communism liberates the individual from himself,' said McVicar.

‘So does castration,' said Magnus more rudely than ever.

Meiklejohn attempted to create a diversion by telling the story of his arrest for brawling in defence of Racine, but Skene, making a gesture for silence, asked Magnus if he drank heavily.

‘I'm fond of drinking, and sometimes I get drunk,' said Magnus.

‘I drink a great deal,' said Skene. ‘I'm a philosophical drunkard. I drink because I like drink, and I like the good fellowship that goes with drinking. But there's a more important reason.—What was the social argument for classical drama? By rousing emotion it purged the mind of emotion. It excited pity and fear, and by exciting them it cleared them out of the system. It was a cathartic. Well, drink is a better cathartic than anything that Aeschylus or Euripides ever wrote, and when I'm tired by poetry, weary with the loveliness and the height of poetic thought, drinking washes out the poetry and brings me back to the ordinary common world. I come back to common life and its dirt and rest myself there. I touch these things with the common touch and relieve my overwrought senses. I find comfort again. Drink does that for a man, and Communism would, in some ways, have the same effect. I could be free of myself in a Communist state.'

‘But I don't want to be free of myself,' said Magnus.

‘Then you've never felt the burden of poetry,' said Skene.

There was such conviction in Skene's voice that Magnus could find no answer or objection that did not seem trivial. A nervous triumph irradiated the poet. His hands trembled,
his eyes shone brightly. On the edge of the light that escaped from a shaded lamp his great bush of hair seemed like a burning bush. His political opinions, thought Magnus, are the waste products of his genius.

Meanwhile McVicar was talking very earnestly to Meiklejohn. Magnus overheard a fragment of his conversation: ‘I certainly don't believe in marriage, and I'm not in favour of birth control. There would be no need for contraceptives if people could be persuaded to abandon their romantic interest in love and content themselves with biological selection. I want the girl with whom I mate simply to regard me as a suitable father for her child.'

Skene said: ‘You're a successful novelist, Merriman. But what are you aiming at? What do you think the future of writing is going to be?'

Magnus, who had never given much thought to the matter, promptly declared that he was a traditionalist. He was beginning to enunciate a conservative policy for literature when Skene interrupted him.

As if it were a pistol he aimed his slender and rather dirty forefinger at Magnus and said, with cold and deliberate ferocity: ‘You're feeding on corpse-meat. In all its traditional forms English literature is dead, and to depend on the past for inspiration is a necrophagous perversion. We've got to start again, and the great literary problem confronting us today is to discover how far we must retract the horizontal before erecting a perpendicular.'

The solemnity with which Skene enunciated his last sentence persuaded Magnus of its importance, but as it was also somewhat obscure he hesitated to reply until he had elucidated its meaning. Skene took advantage of his silence to continue.

‘I don't write prose myself,' he said, ‘but if I did I should consider a story as an exercise in pure thought. I should write a story like this, for example: There's a man sitting at a window with a tray on his knees, and on the tray there are six insects running about. He's watching them. They're all exactly alike and indistinguishable from one another. Presently his wife comes in and looks over his shoulder and says: “There's a new one among them. There's a new insect
on the tray.” He looks again, and though the insects are all so alike as to be absolutely indistinguishable, he knows that his wife is right and that one of them is a newcomer. Now how did she know that? And how, eventually, did he know the truth for himself?—There's a theme I should like to elaborate, and I could make quite a long story out of it.'